Fundamentals of marketing

and consumer behavior

Unit 4
The consumer as an individual
Personality, Motivation, Perception, Learning and Consumer behavior
Personality
• Personality is a psychographic variable, like the individuals’ system of values, lifestyles and attitudes,
among other. These variables provide major orientation to companies in order to identify their
potential market.
• Integrating personality constructs into models of consumer psychology can clarify demographic and
other individual differences with respect to a variety of phenomena.
• Individual differences are well summarized within five broad, high-level traits or “domains”:
neuroticism (vs. emotional stability), extraversion, agreeableness, openness-to-experience or
intellect, and conscientiousness.
• Research has found strong relationships between enduring traits and consumers’ specific cognitive
and emotional responses to advertisements and persuasive messages.
• Women have been shown to be higher on the personality traits agreeableness and neuroticism and
thereby exhibit a more socially and environmentally friendly purchase behaviours.
• Enduring personality traits, including specifically agreeableness and openness-to experience, have
been shown to influence attitudes and behaviours related to social and environmental responsibility.
• The nature and content of agreeableness, which has been defined as the propensity to be altruistic,
trusting, modest, and warm. Agreeableness is primarily a dimension of interpersonal tendencies. The
agreeable person is fundamentally altruistic …sympathetic to others and eager to help them, and
believes that others will be equally helpful in return.
• Agreeableness has been related to interpersonal empathy and to values related to benevolence.
Thus agreeableness appears to be a strong candidate to explain the relationship between sex and
sustainable consumer behavior.
• Similarly, openness-to-experience has been related to values such as universalism and benevolence,
and to socially compassionate, traditionally moral, and egalitarian sociopolitical attitudes, i.e., values
and attitudes that are also likely to be related to sustainable consumer behavior.
• Different people place their relative importance to their needs differently. The need to belong is
important and would like to place family as a priority while others would like to explore and hence
their driving force is to discover. These difference in needs influence the consumer to react to adds,
preferences and buying strategies. .
• Individuals behave in a nonconscious manner according to their nonconscious attitudes, beliefs and
emotions that can be activated by subtle cues from the environment. Thus priming can be a
powerful way to motivate a customer. Primes activate the underlying emotions and personalities
• Thus these beliefs, perceptions and emotions become the foundations for every decision we make
during a purchase.
 Motivation
• The purchase decision making process is the recognition of a need or buying motive.
• Motivation is of crucial importance in contributing to consumer decision making process. To
understand why and how consumers buy, marketers must first grasp motivation.
• Motivation is related to expectations, needs, and wants. Individual purchases an article as a
consequence of certain mental and economic forces creating desires or wants, which he
understands can be satisfied by the articles offered for purchase.
• Number of buying motives may prompt a consumer to purchase an article such as fear, desire for
money, vanity, pride, fashion, possession, affection, comfort, sex or romance. Thus, his inner
motives direct him to behave in a particular fashion.
• Motives- can be defined as a drive or an urge for which an individual seeks satisfaction. Motives
are all those inner striving conditions variously described as wishes, desires, needs, drives, and the
like. It is basically a need sufficiently stimulated to move an individual to seek satisfaction.
• A motive becomes a buying motive when the individual seeks satisfaction through the purchase
of some article. It is, thus, an inner urge that moves or prompts a person to some action.
• Consumers purchase any good as a result of certain mental and economic forces that create
desires or wants that they know can be satisfied by the goods offered for purchase.
• Berelson and Steiner have defined a motive as the inner state that energizes, activates
or moves (hence motivation)…. and that directs or channels behavior toward goals.
• For consumer behavior purpose, it may be defined as the drive to satisfy perceived
needs by purchases and to alleviate self-image by specific product and brand selection. It
is thus related to a force that drives the consumer toward a specific goal.
• Motives can reduce or increase tension in individuals. When motives prompt us toward
our goals, they reduce tension, but, if some motives impel us toward one goal while
other motives pull us toward a different goal, tension may increase because we cannot
reach either goal. At a particular time, many different motives may influence consumer
behavior.
• Three theoretical assumptions about human motivation are particularly important to
marketers. They are: A consumer buys a particular product because he is influenced by
certain motives. Every human activity is motivated, and is not spontaneous. Consumers
are goal seekers who satisfy their needs by purchases and consumption. In other words,
needs are the motivational elements behind purchase
Theories of motivation
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs “is a useful tool for understanding consumer motivations and is readily adaptable
to marketing strategy, primarily because consumer goods often serve to satisfy each of the need levels.
• Individuals buy houses, food, and clothing to satisfy physiological needs. Buy insurance and radial tires and
vocational training to satisfy safety and security needs. Personal care products are bought to satisfy social
needs. Luxury products are often bought to fulfill ego needs, and college training and financial services are sold
as ways of achieving self-fulfillment. The marketing success of a brand depends on its ability to satisfy several
needs at once.
• Psychoanalytic Theory of Motivation- The concept of irrational people, lacking control over their own behavior,
was central to the development of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of motivation. His theory placed the
motivational emphasis on sexual and aggressive instincts.
• The defense mechanisms to resolve the conflicts created between the id and superego, and, thus protects his
self-image.
• There are four defense mechanisms -repression, he sends back the unacceptable feelings. Displacement-
substitute an acceptable object for a socially or morally unacceptable one in search for pleasure seeking or
tension reduction; projection- attributes his own disliked characteristics on to others; identification- justify
unpleasant behavior, by associating or comparing with someone popular
• Gestalt Theory- motivation of an individual is determined by all of the forces present
simultaneously in his mind or psyche.
• Motivation and corresponding behavior is a function of all of the forces of an individual’s mind
i.e., an action or behavior is the outcome of the individual’s experiences, past, goals, as well as
the environment surrounding him.
• One’s motivation may be understood by taking into account one’s desires, fears, and inhibitors.
• When a need remains unmet, an individual feels tension, and he tries to reduce it by taking
into account the combining force or valence of the act.
• It includes both positive and negative consequences involved in the satisfaction of the unmet
need. He makes an equation in his mind on the positive and negative consequences. His
ultimate behavior is dependent on the result of his mental equation.
• The cognitive theory- Motivation is an inseparable part of an individual’s mental structure. An
individual’s motivation is the result of information processing and evaluation of problem
related aspects by using his/her mental frame.
• Mental or cognitive frame or structure is composed of one’s beliefs, values, images,
experiences, attitudes, and perceptions and human behavior has problem solving in nature.
• Motivation of consumers should be studied in terms of the total aspect of their behaviors;
purchase of an item may involve more than one motive instead of a single motive.
 Perception
• Perception is the process through which one gathers, processes, and interprets
information from the environment. Consumers’ perception of a particular
product will affect consumer’s decision hence is an important marker for the
marketer.
• Different individual perceives the same object at the same time in different
ways. Similarly, the same individual at different times may perceive the same
thing in different ways.
• When a consumer feels that he is having a need unmet, he will do
something that is capable of satisfying his need.
• What he will do in such a situation depends on his perception of the
situation.
• Though consumers have many needs that are basically similar, they
try to satisfy them differently, depending on how they perceive
both their needs and the environment
• Consumers’ view of their environment is filtered by their perception, which is the unique
way in which each person sees, organizes, and interprets things. They see the same thing
differently for a variety of reasons however, they tend to act on the basis of their
perceptions.
• It plays a major role in the stage of the buying-decision process. Our senses are exposed
to those, with the power to capture and hold our attention, have the potential of being
perceived.
• Once buyer is aware of his/ her needs, he/she engages in decision-making process, hence
tries to gather information on products and alternative solutions to his problem; the more
aware of store sales, looks for the product information in newspapers, magazines, and in
other media. All of the information thus collected tend to go through a series of filters in
which it is often distorted. The said process of interpreting data is called perception.
• It is a process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret information to form a
comprehensible picture of the world around them.
• In marketing context, perception means values attached to communications about
products received from salespeople, friends, advertisements, and independent test
reports
• Perception is a three-step process-
• Selective exposure- Individuals receive numerous information at once, but
only a few of them reach awareness because we select some inputs and
ignore the rest as we do not have the ability to be conscious of all inputs at
one time. This leads to selective distortion ( information received is not in
conformity with either feelings or beliefs) and selective retention
(remembers information supports feelings and beliefs).
• The second step- is the organization of stimuli noticed by the individual;
information reaches awareness and organized to get meaning out of it.
• The third step- is interpretation of stimuli received and organized. Using the
cognitive structure, interprets the said information.
• Information thus interpreted is usually influenced and filtered by the
intensity and frequency of the stimuli along with other competing stimuli in
the environment, and the needs, inner feelings, and experiences
 Theories of Perception
• The Gestalt Theory- focuses on how people organize or combine stimuli around
them into a meaningful whole. It means that stimuli are evaluated in the context
of a total situation rather than isolation, in a holistic manner.
• Not only is an object interpreted in the context of its situation, all aspects of the
object itself influence our interpretation. It can include our reaction to the
overall aspects and background of the situation, as well as the explicit content
and even lack of content in the said object or stimulus.
• Cognitive Theory- The cognitive structure is composed of an individual’s
experiences, values, beliefs, images, ideas, and attitudes. By using this structure,
we try to differentiate between stimuli, and find different meanings out of
them.
• Perceptual process helps him bringing changes in beliefs, and knowledge to
accept new ideas and maintain internal cognitive balance.
Perception and Marketing Significance
• Visual Mode: By seeing an object, we form an idea about it, and if we like it
we take it into active consideration for future decision. Hence, marketers
develop attractive product or packages, that give positive visual stimuli to
consumer.
• Hearing or Aural Mode: Sounds also convey messages to our brain.
• Smell and Taste or Olfactory Mode: we smell and taste things together. If
an individual’s perceptions of smell and taste are positive toward an item,
his chance of buying that item increases.
• Touch or Tactile Mode: touch is very important for consumers to decide on
a particular brand of a product. We touch thing with our fingertips which
are very sensitive perceptors as nerve endings are closely clustered there
Learning
• Acquiring information that can be used in future. Consumers learn in many
ways that could be concerned with knowledge by description, information from
encounters involving verbal description, depiction or modeling, description of
experience and education.
• Learning has been described as a four stage process consisting of hypothesizing–
exposure–encoding–integration. This process is affected by familiarity,
motivation of customers to learn and ambiguity of information environment.
• Learning has been described as a construct related to product familiarity as well
as to product knowledge. Increased familiarity leads to learning that (a)
decreases search of extant alternatives, (b) increases search and learning for
new alternatives and (c) draws attention to relevant information and ignores
irrelevant information.
• Learning and information search- when confronted with new information, greater
information facilitates greater learning. consumers search for objective
information facilitating deliberation and use of newly acquired information, and
subjective knowledge relying on memory and previously stored information.
• Learning and decision making- Consumer learning has also been found to
interfere with product decision making. More in particular decision biases and
heuristics have been found to be related to learning Increases in the memory load
tend to inhibit analytical processing whereas intentional processing goals tend to
enhance this processing. This may lead to a low level of customer expertise
despite customers’ extensive experience with products via advertising, shopping
and personal usage
• Learning and concept formation, attainment and utilization- A major aspect of
product learning consists of the phenomenon of concept formation. This has
been described as a process of categorising by customers leading to the
formation of consideration sets which may be stable or may fluctuate
considerably across situations
Consumer Behavior
• Consumer behavior is a behavior that consumer displays in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating,
and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs and wants.
• It focuses on how an individual consumer, families or households make decisions to spend their available
resources such as time, money or effort on consumption related items
• The study of consumer behavior includes how consumer thinks- decision making process and decisions;
feels – emotions; and behaves- physical actions that result from those decisions and feelings.
• Therefore consumer behavior is the study of how individuals spend their available resources on products
and services.
• People engage in activities for many reasons other than consumption. When consumers act as an
individual they have one goal in mind- to obtain goods or services that meet their needs and wants.
• All consumers face varying problems associated to acquiring goods and services to satisfy needs. Because
solution of these problems are vital to existence, and economic well-being, they become very important
and hence must make specific types of decisions to obtain the desired product or services.
• There are two types of consumer behaviors
• Personal consumer- buys goods for his/her own use, household or a member /
family/ friend. All these instances, goods or services thus bought are for final use by
an individual, i.e. The end user is an individual.
• Organizational consumer- commercial, for profit, non profit, public-sector,
institutions, etc which buy raw materials and other components to manufacture
and sell their products; service companies must buy equipments necessary to
render service.
• Therefore all organizations must purchase goods, services and materials as direct/
indirect inputs of their offerings and to support their markets.
• However, end use consumers are buyers, payers and users. Consumer behavior
incorporates ideas from several sciences including psychology, biology, chemistry,
and economics.
• Businesses can tailor their marketing efforts to target specific groups, improve
brand loyalty, and identify emerging trends and help businesses stay ahead of their
competition and adapt to changes in consumer behavior.
Why study consumer behavior
• understand how consumers decide on a product.
• Identify products that are needed and are obsolete.
• Generates a maximum impact on consumers.
• key secret to reaching and engaging your clients, and converting them to purchase from you.
• how they feel about various alternatives.
• What influences consumers to choose between various options.
• Personal factors: an individual’s interests and opinions can be influenced by demographics
(age, gender, culture, etc.).
• Psychological factors: an individual’s response to a marketing message will depend on their
perceptions and attitudes.
• Social factors: family, friends, education level, social media, income, all influence consumers’
behavior
Types of consumers
• The complex buyer- purchasing a highly valued product. The behavior involved before
buying a costly product to satisfy.
• Dissonance-reducing buyer- the many varieties of the same product leads to dissonance in
the consumer resulting in decision making difficulties before a purchase and a fear of
regret after purchase.
• The habitual buyer- buying behavior is not focused on an immediate need. The consumer
is involved in purchases of a preferred object than loyalty towards a particular brand.
• Variety seeking buyer- open to experience trait plays a role in exploring different brands
than just satisfying unmet needs.
• Though buying behaviors are unique, behavioral patterns are collective and grouped as
place of purchase, items on/ for purchase, time and frequency of purchase, mode of
purchase.
• Consumer looks into- benefits sought, occasion, usage, brand loyalty and monetary value.