Consumer Behavior Concepts

Marketers may spend significant time trying to parse the thoughts, patterns,
and behaviors of consumers. The better they understand their target
audience, the more they can cater to that audience’s wants and needs. Over
the years, many people have invented theories to try and streamline what they
believe explains these behaviors.

1. Theory of Reasoned Action

Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen originally conceived the theory of reasoned
action: a consumer behavior theory that focuses on the relationship between
marketing and the preexisting attitudes consumers bring to their purchasing
decisions.
According to the theory of reasoned action, consumers act on behaviors that
they believe will create or receive a particular outcome, familiar or otherwise.
As such, rational decision-making is the chief element of what drives
consumers to make purchases.
This consumer behavior concept leans on the significance of specificity over
obtuseness. In other words, a consumer may only take a specific action when
given a reason to believe there’ll be a specific desired result. From the time
the consumer decides to move forward with a decision to the moment the
action is finished, the consumer can change their mind or select a different
course of action.
This has led marketers to several insights, the first being how they must
associate a purchase with a specific positive result. For example, AXE
markets its body spray products in such a way that all who use them might
believe they have improved desirability with women. The theory then
emphasizes the importance of moving consumers through the sales pipeline,
rather than keeping them idle, where they might have an opportunity to talk
themselves out of a purchase or decide to spend their money on a competing
brand.
2. Engel Kollat Blackwell Model
The Engel Kollat Blackwell (EKB) Model is a natural evolution of the ideas
found in the theory of reasoned action. This theory of buyer behavior operates
on a four-phase process that influences how consumers make purchasing
decisions: input, processing information, decision stages, and variables in the
decision-making process.
Input is the first phase, which is simply the stage when consumers take in the
most marketing materials either through billboards, online advertisements, or
in-person displays. Through the data collected in these materials, they
graduate to information processing, during which they combine that input with
experience and expectations to make the best decision for their current
circumstances. Rational insight leads them to the next step, which is where
they actually make a purchasing decision based on the information they
collected.
The decision process also has five phases: recognition of need, information
searching, evaluating alternatives, purchasing (or choosing), and post-
purchase outcomes.
During the initial information stage of the EKB model of consumer behavior
theory, input is the most valuable. Consumers receive enough information
about the product or service to easily recall or turn to the company’s products
for future needs, and again during the external influence phase. One industry
that has a good grasp of this sequence is the lifestyle industry, where brands
know exactly how to market their products to trigger a desire in the consumer,
usually so they look, smell, or feel better than they would if they used
competing brands.

3. Motivation-Need Theory
In 1943, the broader psychological community felt the impact of Abraham
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: a theory that insists that individuals act to satisfy
and fulfill their needs based on a system of five priorities of increasing
importance — physiological survival, safety, love, esteem, and self-
actualization.
Maslow’s theory was used across business and marketing classes to explain
why consumer-tailored marketing messages were critical to sales success. By
appealing to consumers in a way that relates to their level of need, marketing
campaigns could prioritize purchases that instill significance and urgency.
Marketers with a strong understanding of motivation-need consumer behavior
theory can effectively craft campaigns and advertisements around an artificial
need that they control within the consumer. A common modern example
comes in the form of luxury carmakers that emphasize the safety and security
features within their vehicles over the aesthetic, convincing consumers that
spending their money on an expensive luxury car is acceptable because it
fulfills the need to provide physiological safety for oneself and family.

4. Hawkins Stern Impulse Buying

In contrast to the focus on rational action found in most other theories of
consumer behavior, Hawkins Stern put its focus on impulse behavior. It’s
Stern’s argument that the impulse to purchase was only one-half of average
consumer behavior, fitting neatly beside tendencies toward more rational
purchasing decisions. These impulse decisions are influenced mostly by
external stimuli like walking past a convincing advertisement and possess
very little relationship to traditional decision-making habits.
Impulse buying exists on four levels of the Stern philosophy. The first level is
the quick, pure impulse purchase, like making a last-minute purchase on the
way out of a grocery or hardware store. The second level is known as the
“reminded” impulse purchase, which makes associations between one
product and another. For example, placing chips and salsa in the same aisle,
so if you’re planning to buy one, you’re reminded you may want the other.
The third level is the suggested impulse purchase, such as tacking on a
warranty offer as you purchase electronics or power tools. The fourth level is
the planned impulse decision, which is deliberate in that consumers know they
want to buy a type of product, but just aren’t sure of the specifics.
Marketers have spent years trying to master the power of impulse purchases.
From the art of packaging to the arrangement of a product on store shelves,
everything has an impact on the target audience’s impulse control.

5. Theory of Buyer Behavior

The core concept present in the theory of buyer behavior is that purchasing
behavior is, generally speaking, reliably repetitive and prone to establishing a
familiar purchasing routine to save time and simplify the decision-making
process. In answer to this, the theory seeks to identify the elements of that
decision process and note any changes that occur, and whether those things
grew out of a commercial and social environment that any given brand could
influence.
According to this consumer behavior theory, a buyer’s preferred choice of
brand is informed by motives; alternative choices, or courses of action; and
any decision mediators that match the motives with those alternatives, such
as whether the buyer thinks coffee is better in the morning or the evening.
Through understanding these mediators, the alternative brands on the market,
and the brands the consumer is aware of, there’s room to find a gap and
make something that fills that gap.
In addition, there’s an opportunity when a new buyer is in the market to
purchase a new type of product (product class), but lacks experience or
knowledge of the product needed. The information the buyer seeks or
accidentally receives from a third party is processed through the lens of what’s
needed and how well that product might fulfill that need.
It may also be compared to previous types of products and use a similar
process in making the new decision. For example, according to the theory of
buyer behavior, a buyer may generalize the experience of purchasing a
refrigerator and use that experience to inform the purchase of a new
dishwasher.
Regardless of the source, the one making the purchase develops the decision
mediators needed to reliably choose that brand in the future based on what
seems to have the best potential for satisfying the purchaser’s motives.