CONSUMER DECISION MAKING AND DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION- SUMMARY

To understand how a consumer takes decisions regarding the brands, we need to understand

consumer's decision-making journey. Consumer Decision Making Model helps us focus on

consumer's decisions and psychology from the point of need recognition until product

consumption. It has 3 stages-

(i) Input- It consists of the Marketing mix(4Ps, strategies needed to inform, reach and

persuade customers), Socio-cultural influences(Consumers’ family, peers, social class,

reference groups, cliques culture), and communication sources(Ads, social media, word of

mouth, etc). These factors influence consumer purchases and determine how they use their

bought products.

(ii) Process- This stage focuses on how motivation, perception, learning, personality and

attitudes affect decision making.

• This stage begins when consumer faces a need recognition regarding a problem. It can

be of two types- Actual state (figure out the problem in the product they are using and

then desire for another) and Desired state (desire triggers the decision-making

process).

• Next is the decision spectrum, in which customers are engaged in either extensive or

limited problem solving or routinized purchase behaviour of their products. They have

either low or high involvement in how relevant the purchase of that product is for

them.

• After this Pre-purchase information search takes place after the need recognition is

done. It is done by consumers’ past memory/experiences or externally like by window

shopping/internet surfing. The more related the past experience is to the customer; the

less external information is required by customer to reach the purchase decision. And
 the less the customer knows about a product, more does he take up external pre-

purchase search. He is also faced by task complexity, time constraint and information

organisation while reaching the purchase decision.

• Once information search is done, the consumer moves to evaluation of the alternatives

in the evoked set after considering few products from that category, and generally

ignores the inept and inert sets.

• The consumer makes decision by complying to rules such as compensatory, non-

compensatory (Conjunctive, disjunctive, lexicographic), affect referral, recognition or

majority vote rules. These rules reduce the burden and complexity of decision

making by providing guidelines/routines that simplify the task.

A marketer who is aware of this decision-making process of consumer should align its

marketing strategies accordingly to enhance the process and have the customer's

inclination towards its brand.

(iii) Output- It consists of purchase behaviours, product consumption and post purchase

evaluation of the bought and consumed products. Three types of buying decisions taken by

customers- trial, repeat & purchase. People who pass the product's trial phase and like it will

repeat their purchases and might also reflect brand loyalty and promote the brand by word of

mouth or by self-generation of social media content. Positive disconfirmation of expectation

occurs when product’s performance is greater than expected and Negative disconfirmation of

expectation occurs when performance fall below the performance. Phases like cognitive

dissonance and cabinet castaways also take place post purchase.

Above three stages help us understand consumer journey. It is different for both, high

involvement as well as low involvement products. Also, all the decisions regarding product

purchases do not involve the same degree of information search; it varies according to people

and products.