Customer Behavior

Question 1

Cunsumer Behavior

Answer 1

Consumer behavior is the study of processes involved when individuals or
groups select, purchase, use or dispose of products, services, ideas, or experiences that satisfy
needs and desires.

Question 2

Consumer behavior graph

Answer 2

Question 3

Consumer Behavior and Marketing Management

Pre-purchasing issues

Answer 3

Question 4

Consumer Behavior and Marketing Management

Purchase issue

Answer 4

Question 5

Consumer Behavior and Marketing Management

Post-purchase issue

Answer 5

Question 6

Involvement

Product involvement

Answer 6

Product involvement = a consumer’s level of interest in a particular product/service

Question 7

Involvement

Purchase situation involvement

Answer 7

Purchase situation involvement = differences in motivation during process of interacting with store or website

Question 8

Involvement

Message-response involvement

Answer 8

Message-response involvement = customer’s willingness to seek out, assimilate, process and store information

Question 9

Low vs High involvement

Answer 9

Question 10

Elaboration Likelihood Model

Answer 10

Elaboration Likelihood Model is a model for how information is processed.

• high involvement processing: cognitive responses, belief and attitude change, behavior change
• low involvement processing: belief change, behavior change, attitude change

In high elaboration likelihood consumers are interested and willing to process advertising messages actively. Information will take a central route to persuasion. Arguments can be more complex and have more content.

Low elaboration likelihood consumers are not willing to process information actively. Arguments must be easy to memorize, the substance is rather unimportant

Question 11

Characterization of buying decision behavior

Answer 11

Question 12

The buyer’s decision process

Answer 12

1. Need recognition (potential buyer perceives a difference between his ideal and his actual
   state of affairs, which leads to the realization of a need)
2. Information search (seeking relevant information about potential satisfiers of this need from
   an external environment and/or activating knowledge from memory)
3. Evaluation of alternatives (evaluating/judging competing alternatives, combining his
   knowledge to make a choice, formation of attitudes, preferences and purchase intention)
4. Purchase decision (buying the chosen alternative)
5. Post-purchase cognitions (using the chosen alternative and evaluating it in light of its
   performance)

Question 13

Decision Process and Marketing

Answer 13

1. Need recognition : What are the consumer’s needs?
2. Information search : How does the potential buyer gather information?
3. Evaluation of alternatives : How do potential buyers perceive and evaluate available brands, products and service offers?
4. Purchase decision : What type of decision does the consumer make?
5. Post-purchase cognition : How do these cognitions influence the future behavior of the
   consumer (word-of-mouth, complaint behavior, repurchasing, etc.)?

Question 14

Need recognition

Answer 14

Happens through internal stimuli. Needs can either be physiological (hunger,
thirst) or psychological (increasing self-esteem ® buying new clothes, getting a haircut, etc.) in
nature.

Question 15

Information search

Answer 15

Information search can be both internal and external. Internal search is a passive approach to gathering information in which the consumer’s own memory is the main source
of information about a product (low interest in the product or already enough information available for making a decision). External search is a proactive approach to gathering information in which the consumer collects new information from sources outside the consumer’s own experience
(happens when the decision maker believes that more information is necessary to make a
decision).

Question 16

Attitude

Answer 16

An attitude is a lasting, general evaluation of people (including oneself), objects,
advertisements or issues. An attitude typically has three components:

• Affect (how a consumer feels about an object)
• Behavior (refers to the consumer’s intention to take action)
• Cognition (what the consumer believes to be true about the attitude object)

Question 17

Hierarchies of effects

Answer 17

Are constructed of the three components of attitude: Affect, Behavior, Cognition

Question 18

Example for low involvement hierarchy

Answer 18

Attitudes not only determine behavior - behavior also determines attitudes

Asking consumers to state the benefit of the product

Question 19

Example for an experimental hierarchy

Answer 19

Prompting affective reactions, which lead to impulsive buying behavior

-> often used when launching special offers

Question 20

Multi attribute attitude models

Answer 20

Attitude models specify the different elements that might work
together to influence people’s evaluations of attitude objects. Multi attribute attitude models are
used to understand complex attitudes. Basic multi attribute models contain three specific elements:

• Attributes (characteristics of the attitude object)
• Beliefs (cognitions and/or emotions about the specific attitude object (usually relative to others within the comparison set)
• Importance weighs (reflect the relative priority of an attribute to the consumer

Question 21

Intention vs. behavior

Answer 21

Attitudes are not always consistent with behavior because there are many factors interfering with behavior intentions ( = intention-behavior gap). The Theory of Planned Behavior was aimed to overcome this problem.

Question 22

The theory of planned behavior

Answer 22

Tries to explain why attitudes are not always consistent with
behavior, designed to predict and explain human behavior in specific contexts.

Behavior: depends on motivation (intention) and ability (behavioral control)
Intention: cognitive representation of a person’s readiness to perform a given behavior, indicates how hard people are willing to try in order to perform the behavior, determined by attitude toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.
Attitude toward behavior: degree to which a person has a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of the behavior in question
Subjective norms: social factor, perceived social pressure to perform or not to perform behavior
Perceived behavioral control: a person’s confidence in his/her ability to perform a behavior, perceived as ease or difficulty of preforming the behavior, reflects past experience and anticipated
impediments

Question 23

Customer (Dis)Statisfaction

Answer 23

Satisfaction = Perception -Expectation

Question 24

Confirmation-Disconfirmation Paradigm (C-D-Paradigm)

Answer 24

• Positive Disconfirmation = better than expected = satisfaction
• negative disconfirmation = worse than expected = dissatisfaction

Question 25

Dissonance post purchase

Answer 25

Dissonance: “have I done the right thing?”

After having made an unpleasant decision, feelings of dissonance will evolve that express the decision maker’s concern about the his choice

This especially happens:

• The decision category is perceived as being important (high involvement)
• The outcome of the decision is difficult to predict and/or risky
• The decision maker obtains new information

Question 26

Management post purchase

Answer 26

After a customer has made a purchase, it is the Manager’s task to
reinforce buyer’s decision through after-sales marketing, keeping in contact with the costumer, reinforcing with positive news and by bringing new buyers (and potential costumers) together.