Consumer Behaviour Flashcards
Consumer behaviour is…
The process individuals or groups go through to select, purchase, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas or experiences to satisfy their needs and desires.
Marketers need to understand…
The many factors that influence each step in the consumer behaviour process:
■ Internal factors (psychology)
■ Situational factors at the time of purchase (context)
■ Social influences of people around us (culture)
Decision making can range from:
Painstaking (scrupuleux, prudent) analysis, to Pure whim (caprice)
The scale of effort ranging from:
Habitual decisions (little importance), to Extended problem solving (important decisions)
Extended problem solving vs Habitual decision making:
Consumer Decision Types:
e.g. limited=a fairly expensive pair of shoes/clothes
What is the role of perceived risk in the decision process? Give examples….
■ Functional Risk?
■ Social Risk?
■ Financial Risk?
■ Physical Risk?
■ Time Risks?
■ Psychological Risks?
■ Moral Risk?
■ Health Risk
What are the 5 steps of the customer’s decision making process?
- Problem Recognition
- Information Search (alternatives)
- Evaluation of Alternatives
- Product Choice
- Post-Purchase Evaluation
Step 1: Problem recognition
Difference between the current state of affairs and some desired or ideal state in the future
- Marketing subtext: something is wrong with you!
- Marketing sociology: you aren’t born with your desires, desires are something you acquire
Advertising messages stimulate …
Consumers to recognize that their current state just doesn’t equal their desired state.
Getting a job - (an exercise in problem recognition)
■What are a potential employer’s needs (problems and challenges)? And/or how might you personally (as the product) influence those needs?
Share job specifications (employer needs/problems) and connect those problems with what you provide….
What is the problem to which you could be the answer???
- Teamwork/collaborator
- Develop/implement
- Attention to detail
- Challenge and question senior stakeholders
- Liaison/communication
- Monitor/track/evaluate/report
Stage 2: Information about alternatives
■ Memory
■ Surveys of the environment
■ Internet
Stage 3: Evaluation
■ First select realistic contenders: Feasibility
■ Evaluative Criteria
■ Marketing often involves educating/training the consumer concerning product characteristics worth of evaluation
Step 4: Making the final choice
■ Heuristics (rules of thumb or maxims): price = quality
■ Brand loyalty
■ Country loyalty: German cars….French wine…
■ Utility maximization/meaning maximization…
Step 5: Use and evaluation
■ Satisfaction
■ Dissatisfaction
■ Metrics
■ Meaningfulness
Motivation: Maslov’s pyramid of needs
Exercise Maslov’s Pyramid
Problems with Maslov…and there are a lot:
■ How do you account for suicide?
■ Universalism: cultural differences? Individualist and hedonic bias…
■ ‘Life Without Pain Has No Meaning’: (Arthur Schopenhauer): Artists, philosophers, religious and political people often do what they do at great personal cost and suffering.
■ Masochistic lifestyles: triathlon/ironman, walking the Camino,
■ Accounting for pathologies in general
Consumers are not…
Robots…. Decisions are usually not made as software and need are not objective…
“Think of culture as a society’s personality” : NO!!
Marketing: the “problematisation machine”… or why everybody is miserable
“…marketing represents a perpetual questioning machine asking the modern consumer to make a project of oneself based on ongoing self-examination and querying; to look at oneself as a set of constantly multiplying problems (too fat, too skinny, too boring, etc) and as yet unrealized potentialities [towards the future]; to translate them into personal needs and desires” [emphasis added]
(Zwick & Cayla 2011: 7).
Culture is…
“an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [and women] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life”
(Geertz 1973d:89)
Consumption & Symbolic Meaning:
When a product satisfies more than a physical need, it has symbolic value.
- Social Symbolism: Symbols are part of the creation of our social world.
- Self-Symbolism: Symbols are part of the creation of the identity of the individual
”We are what we consume”
–> Emotion helps out, when rationality gives in
Perception: why is this important?
Perception is the process by which people select, organize and interpret information from the outside world.
We receive information in the form of sensations, the immediate response of our sensory receptors – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and fingers – to such basic stimuli as light, colour and sound.
Consumers are bombarded with products. Marketers need to understand the workings of:
■ Exposure: can the customer register the product (subliminal advertising?)
■ Attention: the extent to which mental processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus
Interpretation: perception is never objective, but involves assigning meaning
■ Hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts).
■ Context
■ Sociocultural paradigm (a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model. “society’s paradigm of the ‘ideal woman’”)
■ Assemblages
Perception and the big picture:
Meaning of perception and context:
Ambivalence in perception:
Learning:
A change in behaviour caused by information or experience. Learning can occur deliberately or when we are not trying.
Behavioural Learning:
Behavioural learning theories assume that learning takes place as a result of connections (associations) that form between events that we perceive
What are the Behavioural Learning conditionings?
■ Classical conditioning, a person perceives two stimuli at about the same time
■ When people learn that their actions result in rewards or punishments it is called operant conditioning.
Which 2 operant conditioning learning techniques have I been using in class?
- Punishment: whistling so it hurts your ears when I say ‘quiet’…
- Praising you when you do well
Think of examples of behavioural learning in marketing
What are Stimulus generalisations?
This means that the good or bad feelings associated with a product will “rub off” on other products that resemble it. Some marketers create product line extensions
Can you think of any product line extensions where stimulus generalization is used?
The cognitive learning theory:
■ This uses the idea of observational learning… and problem solving
■ Putting hot guys and girls on gym equipment or next to a car… which is retarded, but sometimes true (“If I buy a great car I’ll attract hot girls”)
Attitudes: is a lasting evaluation of a person, object, or issue. Consumers have attitudes about brands:
■ Affect is the feeling component of attitudes. Affect refers to the overall emotional response a person has to a product. Affect is usually dominant for expressive products.
■ Cognition, the knowing component, is the belief or knowledge a person has about a product and its important characteristic.
■ Behaviour, the doing component, involves a consumer’s intention to do something, such as the intention to purchase or use a certain product.
Group membership:
■ A reference group is a set of people a consumer wants to please or imitate. Consumers “refer to” these groups in evaluating their behaviour –what they wear, where they go, what brands they buy and so on.
■ Consumers often change their behaviour to gain acceptance into a particular reference group. Conformity is at work when a person changes as a reaction to real or imagined group pressure.
Opinion leader:
Advertisement Analysis Example
■ Segment: Age > The elderly
■ Consumer Behaviour observation: Maslov > belonging and acceptance (don’t anger or burden relatives with funeral costs) / Safety…
■ Aesthetic/symbolism: Over the hill, but still a ways to go……
Personality traits….
■ Innovativeness is the degree to which a person likes to try new things.
■ Materialism is the amount of emphasis placed on owning products.
■ Self-confidence is the degree to which a person has a positive evaluation of her abilities, including the ability to make a good decision.
■ Sociability is the degree to which a person enjoys social interaction.
■ Need for cognition is the degree to which a person likes to think about things and expend the necessary effort to process brand information.
Influences on consumer decisions:
Internal
- Personality
- Self-concept (identity)
- Age
- Family lifestyle
- Challenges: essential psychological traits are not usually helpful
- Idem and Ipse
Social influences
Spatiotemporal
- When, where, how consumers shop (demographic and geographic segmentation);
- Physical characteristics of the shop (smell, lighting, presentation… supermarket shelves);
- Time constraints;
- Daily patterns of life;
- Work-life balance
- Time poverty
- Other factors patterning time
Socio-cultural
- Cultural back ground
- Values
- Religion
- Collectivism vs individualism
- Subcultures
Others
- Opinion leaders
- Science
- Legislation
- etc
