Chapter Five

Consumer Markets and Consumer

Buyer Behavior
Consumer Markets and Consumer
Buyer Behavior
Topic Outline
• Model of Consumer Behavior
• Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behavior
• Types of Buying Decision Behavior
• The Buyer Decision Process
• The Buyer Decision Process for New Products
Model of Consumer Behavior
• Consumer buyer behavior refers to the
buying behavior of final consumers—
individuals and households who buy goods
and services for personal consumption
• Consumer market refers to all of the personal
consumption of final consumers
Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
• Culture is the learned values, perceptions,
wants, and behavior from family and other
important institutions.
• Marketers are always on the lookout for the
“cultural shifts” in order to discover new
products that might be wanted
Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
• Subculture are groups of people within a culture
with shared value systems based on common life
experiences and situations
• Subcultures can be classified in various ways, one
example of that is classification based on religion
such as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Parsi etc
• Other classifications include nationalities, racial
groups and geographic regions (provinces).
• Subcultures make up important market segments
and marketers often design products and campaigns
tailored to their needs.
Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
• Social classes are society’s relatively
permanent and ordered divisions whose
members share similar values, interests, and
behaviors
• Measured not by income alone but by a
combination of factors such as occupation,
income, education, wealth, and other
variables.
• Members of particular socio-classes
demonstrate similar patterns of consumption
and product/brand preferences.
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Social (Reference Groups)
• Online social networks are online communities
where people socialize or exchange information
and opinions
• Include blogs, social networking sites
(Facebook), virtual worlds (second life)
• There is at least one networking site for every
interest or hobby; passportstamp.com for
travelers, flixster.com is for rating movies and
gossip about actors, jango.com is for music fans
find people with similar tastes, and so on and so
forth
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
• Family is the most important consumer-buying
organization in society
• Marketers are interested in the roles and influence of the
husband, wife and children on the purchase of different
products and services.
Class Activity
• Consumers often play different roles within a
family (or household) decision making unit. Your
task in this activity is to identify who might be
involved in the decisions presented to you, and
what role that they may play in that decision.
Purchase Decision Possible Players and Roles
Christmas presents
for the kids
•Kids = Influencers
 
•Both parents and kids =
Information gatherer
 
•Parents together = Decision
maker
•One parent = Purchaser
•Kids = User
•Kids = Initiator (of next
purchase)
Explanation
•The kids write their ‘Santa lists’
requesting (influencing) their presents
for Xmas
•The older kids surf the net regarding
what particular toy type and where
available (information gatherer)
•The parents review store catalogs and
note prices (information gatherer)
• Parents jointly decide what to buy for
kids (decider)
• One parent goes to the store and
buys some of items on agreed list –
also sees a few good deals and buys
them as well (purchaser)
•Kids gets toys/gifts at Christmas (user)
• Kids now want extra accessories for
their new toys/gifts (initiating next
purchase)
Follow-up Questions
• Start by completing the table for these two
product purchase decisions:
1. A new family car
2. The weekly groceries at the supermarket
• Do you think it is important that firms need to
understand the various roles in the family
decision making process? Why?
• Outline, with some examples, how this
knowledge/understanding would influence a
firm’s marketing activities.
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Personal Factors
• People change their purchase patterns over a period of
their age and life-cycle stage
• RBC Royal Bank has identified five life-stage segments:
• Youth—younger than 18
• Getting started—18-35; A Series of “firsts”
• Builders—35-50; Peak earning years, borrow > saving
• Accumulators—50–60; Saving is priority
• Preservers—over 60; Maximize retirement income
• Marketers develop appropriate plans and products for
each stage – Can you develop one for each?
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Personal Factors
• Occupation affects the goods and services bought
by consumers. For example, blue collar workers tend
to buy more rugged clothes, whereas executives buy
more suits.
• Economic situation includes trends in personal
income, savings and interest rates. Depending on the
economic conditions of a country, marketers try to
design, position and price their brands accordingly.
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Personal Factors
• Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in
his or her psychographics.
• It measures a consumer’s AIOs (activities, interests,
opinions) to capture information about a person’s pattern
of acting and interacting in the environment.
• Consumers just don’t buy products, they buy the value
and lifestyles those products represent.
 Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Personal Factors
• Personality and Self-Concept: This refers to the unique
psychological characteristics that lead to consistent and
lasting responses to the consumer’s environment.
• There are 5 unique brand personality traits:
1. Sincerity (down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful
2. Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date)
3. Competence (reliable, intelligent and successful)
4. Sophistication (upper class and charming)
5. Ruggedness (outdoorsy and tough)
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Psychological Factors

Motivation

Perception

Learning

Beliefs and attitudes

Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Psychological Factors
Motivation
• A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to
direct the person to seek satisfaction
• Freudian Theory
• Maslow’s Hierarchy
 Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Psychological Factors
Perception is the process by which people select,
organize, and interpret information to form a
meaningful picture of the world from three
perceptual processes:
• Selective attention is the tendency for people to
screen out most of the information to which they are
exposed
• Selective distortion is the tendency for people to
interpret information in a way that will support what
they already believe
• Selective retention is the tendency to remember
good points made about a brand they favor and forget
good points about competing brands
Characteristics Affecting
Consumer Behavior
Psychological Factors
Beliefs and Attitudes

Belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about

something based on:
• Knowledge
• Opinion
• Faith
Attitudes describe a person’s relatively consistent
evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or
idea
Types of Buying Decision Behavior
The Buyer Decision Process
Class Activity – Evaluation of
Alternatives
• From the various television options listed below,
which one would you choose on the basis of the
six product attributes provided? On
what basis did you make your choice?
Class Activity – Post purchase behavior
• The final phase of the decision process is post-
purchase behavior. And if the product’s
performance does not match prior expectations
consumers will be dissatisfied. This activity
highlights how four different consumers usually
deal with dissatisfaction.
• Review each consumer’s comments. Which of
these customer/s would a firm prefer to deal
with? What actions could a firm undertake to
better deal with dissatisfied customers and turn
them back into satisfied customers?
The Buyer Decision Process for
New Products
Adoption process is the mental process an individual
goes through from first learning about an innovation to
final regular use.
• Stages in the process include:

Awareness Interest Evaluation Trial Adoption

Individual Differences In Adoption
• Five types of New Product Users:
1. Innovators
2. Early Adopters
3. Early Majority
4. Late Majority
5. Laggards
Who is an Innovator?
• Effectively reaching innovators/early adopters
will greatly assist with a faster adoption of a new
product. But who are these innovators? For this
exercise, your task is to describe these two
innovators (using the various attributes in the
table below). With this base information, we can
then consider how we can leverage their
networks through our marketing activities.
 Questions
1. Describe both of these consumers, using your best estimat
of their following characteristics/behaviors:
• Male or female?
• Age?
• Married/partner?
• Occupation?
• Hobbies?
• Favorite TV show?
• Outgoing/friendly?
• Career focused/ambitious?
• When finished, give them a segment nickname
2. Given your profile in Q1, what are some of the ways that we
could communicate effectively with these types of consumers
 Practice Question
1. Select a local brand, not necessarily locally manufactured
2. Identify the company that produces it
3. Describe the company and marketing strategy for the brand
4. Describe the marketing mix of the brand
5. Describe the marketing environment in which the brand
functions and competes
6. List the major competitors and analyze which one is
performing the best
7. Describe the characteristics affecting consumer behavior of
your brand
8. Define the type of buying decision behavior
9. Describe the buying decision process with respect to your
brand