CH. 5 OVERVIEW

The goal of marketing is to affect how customers think about and behave toward the organization and its market offerings. But to affect

the whats, whens, and hows of buying behavior, marketers must first understand the whys.

Consumer buyer behavior refers to the buying behavior of final consumers—individuals and households who buy goods and services

for personal consumption. All of these consumers combine to make up the consumer market.

How do consumers respond to various marketing efforts the company might use? The starting point is the stimulus-response model of

buyer behavior shown below.

Marketing stimuli (environment) consist of the four Ps: product, price, place, promotion. Other stimuli include major forces and events in

the buyer’s environment: economic, technological, social, and cultural.

The marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses inside the consumer’s “black box,” which has two parts.

1. The buyer’s characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli.

2. The buyer’s decision process itself affects the buyer’s behavior.

Characteristics Affecting Consumer Buyer Behavior:

Cultural Factors

Culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior. Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts. Subcultures are

groups of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations. Social classes are society’s relatively

permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviors.

Social Factors

Marketers of brands subjected to strong group influence must figure out how to reach opinion leaders—people within a reference group

who, because of special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exert social influence on others. Influencer marketing

is enlisting established influencers or creating new influencers to spread the word about a company’s brands. Online social networks

are online communities where people socialize or exchange information and opinions.

Personal Factors

Age and Life Stage. People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetimes. Economic Situation. A person’s economic

situation will affect store and product choice. Marketers watch trends in spending, personal income, savings, and interest rates.

Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that distinguish a person or group.

Psychological Factors

Motive (drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction of the need. Consumers often don’t know or

can’t describe why they act as they do. Thus, motivation researchers use a variety of probing techniques to uncover underlying emotions

and attitudes toward brands and buying situations. Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information

to form a meaningful picture of the world.

Buying Decision Behavior and the Buyer Decision Process

Types of Buying Decision Behavior

The figure below shows types of consumer buying behavior based on the degree of buyer involvement and the degree of differences

among brands.

Buying behavior differs greatly for a tube of toothpaste, a smartphone, financial services, and a new car. More complex decisions usually

involve more buying participants and more buyer deliberation. For example, someone buying a new car might undertake a full informationgathering and brand evaluation process. At the other extreme, for low-involvement products, consumers may simply select a familiar

brand out of habit.

Consumers undertake complex buying behavior when they are highly involved in a purchase and perceive significant differences among

brands. Consumers may be highly involved when the product is expensive, risky, purchased infrequently, and highly self-expressive.

Dissonance-reducing buying behavior occurs when consumers are highly involved with an expensive, infrequent, or risky purchase but

see little difference among brands.

Habitual buying behavior occurs under conditions of low-consumer involvement and little significant brand difference.

Consumers undertake variety-seeking buying behavior in situations characterized by low consumer involvement but significant perceived

brand differences. In such cases, consumers often do a lot of brand switching.

The Buyer Decision Process

The buyer decision process consists of five stages:

• Need Recognition may occur because of an advertisement or a discussion with a friend and get you thinking about

buying a new car. This is the stage where the marketer should research consumers to find out what kinds of needs or

problems arise, what brought them about, and how they led the consumer to this particular product.

• Information Search may or may not occur. If the consumer’s drive is strong and a satisfying product is near at hand, he or she

is likely to buy it then. If not, the consumer may store the need in memory or undertake an information search related to the

need.

• Alternative evaluation is how the consumer processes information to arrive at brand choices. The evaluation may involve

careful calculations and logical thinking or little or no evaluating, buying on impulse, and relying on intuition.

• Generally, the consumer’s purchase decision will be to buy the most preferred brand.

• Postpurchase behavior: The difference between the consumer’s expectations and the perceived performance of the item

purchased determines the degree of consumer satisfaction. What determines whether the buyer is satisfied or dissatisfied with

a purchase? The answer lies in the relationship between the consumer’s expectations and the product’s perceived performance.