Three elements that should be researched and analyzed to develop effective marketing strategies:

1. Consumer Affect and Cognition - two types of mental responses consumers exhibit towards stimuli and events in their environment.

   • Affect

     • their feelings about stimuli and events.

     • includes: emotions, feeling states, moods, and attitudes.

   • Cognition

     • their thinking.

     • the mental structures and processes involved in thinking, understanding, and interpreting stimuli and events.

     • includes: knowledge, meaning, beliefs, processes associated with paying attention to and understanding stimuli and events, remembering past events, forming evaluations, and making purchasing decisions and choices.

2. Consumer behavior

   • Behavior - the physical actions of consuemrs that can be directly observed and measured by others.

     • Overt behavior - can be observed and distinguished.

     • Covert behavior - cannot be observed and distinguished.

3. Consumer environments - everything external to consumers that influences what they think, feel, and do.

   • Social Stimuli - the actions of others in cultures, subcultures, social classes, reference groups, and familieis, that influence consumers.

   • Physical Stimuli - store, products, advertisements, and signs, that can change consumers’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Consumer processes not only involve a dynamic and interactive system, but also represent a reciprocal system.

Recipcrocal System - any of the elements can be either a cause or an effect of a change at any particular time.

Five implications of viewing consumer processes as a reciprocal system:

1. Any comprehensive analysis of consumers must consider all three elements and the relationships among them.

2. Any of the three elements may be the starting point for consumer analysis.

3. Because this view is dynamic, it recognizes that consumers can continuously change.

4. Consumer analysis can be applied at several levels.

The different levels:

1. Society

2. Industry

3. Market Segment

4. Individual

Marketing strategy - a set of stimuli placed on consumers’ environmetns designed to influence their affect, cognition, and behavior.