However, buying behaviour is not simple. The marketers can find out what consumers buy, where and how much, but it is not easy to lean about the reasons of consumer buying behaviour, which are locked deep within the consumer’s head. There are four different factors affecting consumer behaviour: cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics. Although many of these factors cannot be influenced by the marketer, they can be useful in identifying interested buyers and in shaping products in order to serve consumer’s needs better. The main points are shown below:
Factors influencing consumer behaviour:
Cultural factors
Cultural factors influence on consumer behaviour broadly and deeply. The marketers need to know the roles of culture, subculture, and social class.
- Culture is the most basic determinant of a person’s wants and behaviour. To learn culture is about learning human behaviour of every group and society, which vary greatly from country to county, even neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Marketers need to know the people under different cultures, who have different basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviours.
- Subcultures are “cultures within cultures” that have distinct values and lifestyles and can be based on anything from age and ethnicity. For example, in the U.S. markets, there are some subcultures differing from the groups of Hispanic consumers, African American consumers, Asian American consumers, and mature consumers. As a result, each subculture has its own preferences and behaviour.
- Social classes are relevantly permanent and ordered divisions in a society. Marketers are interested in social class because people within a given class exhibit similar buying behaviour.
People with different cultural, subcultural characteristics in certain social class have different product and brand preferences. Therefore, marketers need to focus their marketing progammes on special needs of certain groups. For example, in America, financial services marketers have long targeted Chinese American consumers because this group of people not only have much higher household income than general standard, but also they like investing in stock – they trade two or three times trading than others.
Social factors
A consumer’s behaviour also influenced by social factors, such as the small groups, family, and social roles and status.
- Marketers think groups as two or more people interact to accomplish individual or mutual goals. People often are influenced by membership groups, which they belong to, as well as by reference groups, which they do not belong to. A person’s reference groups – family, friends, social organizations, professional associations – strongly affect product and brand choice. Therefore, marketers try to identify opinion leaders within the reference groups of their target markets, then direct marketing efforts to them, because this group of people own special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics and exert influence on others’ buying behaviour.
- The family is the most important consumer buying organisation in society. Marketers have been researched extensively in the roles and influence of the husband, wife, and children on the different purchases.
- The person’s position in each group can be defined in terms of both role and status. The roles played by people are related to the persons around them and each of roles reflects a status given to it by society. So people often choose products that show their status in society.
Personal factors
A buyer’s decisions are influenced by personal characteristics such as the buyer’s age and life cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, and personality and self-concept.
- People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetime. Marketers often define their target markets in terms of life cycle stage and develop appropriate products and marketing plans for each stage. If doing so, the firm is able to create brand loyalty early and to develop long-term relationships.
- Consumer lifestyles – the whole pattern of acting and interacting in the world – are also important influence on purchase decision. Marketers to understand how they affect buying behaviour can use some lifestyle classifications or segmentations, and the concept can help marketers change consumer values.
- Personality is a person’s distinguishing psychological characteristics, which are usually described in terms of traits. Marketers study brand personality, which is the specific mix of human traits that may be attributed to a particular brand. Hence, the brands built aim to attract persons who are high on the same personality traits.
- Other elements, like occupation and economic situation, will affect product choice of consumer. This is not difficult for marketers to identify and direct the marketing programmes.
Psychological factors
A person’s buying choices are further influenced by major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.
- Marketers want to know what needs is the consumer trying to satisfy. A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction. After knowing the motivation of a consumer, marketers can collect in-depth information to uncover the deeper motives for their product choices at the particular times.
- Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world. Marketers have to work especially work hard to attract the consumer’s attention, to use right advertising and sales information to effect the mind-sets of consumers, and to retain the messages in the mind of their targeting consumers.
- Because most of human behaviour is learned, marketers can build up demand for a product using the learning theory.
- People often formulate about specific products and services. These beliefs and attitudes make up product and brand images that affect buying behaviour. If some of the beliefs and attitudes are wrong and prevent purchase, the marketer should launch a campaign to correct them. But to change an attitude is very difficult.
Types of buying-decision behaviour
Buying behaviour may vary greatly across different types of products and buying decision, which are based on the degree of buyer involvement and the degree of differences among brands.
Consumers undertake complex buying behaviour when they are highly involved in a purchase and perceive significant differences among brands. Dissonance-reducing behaviour occurs when consumers are higher involved but see little difference among brands. Habitual buying behaviour occurs under conditions of low involvement and little significant brand difference. In situations characterized by low involvement but significant perceived brand differences, consumers engage in variety-seeking buying behaviour.
The buy decision process
When making a purchase, the buyer goes through a decision process consisting of need recognition search, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behaviour.
The marketer’s job is to understand the buyer’s behaviour at each stage and the influences that are operating. During need recognition, the consumer recognizes a problem or need that could be satisfied by a product or service in the market. Once the need is recognized, the consumer is aroused to seek more information and moves into the information search stage. With information in hand, the consumer proceeds to alternative evaluation, during which the information is used to evaluate brands in the choice set. From there, the consumer makes a purchase decision and actually buys the product. In the final stage of the buyer decision process, postpurchase behaviour, the consumer takes action based on satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
By studying the overall buyer decision, marketers now recognize that consumer behaviour is an ongoing process, not merely what the exchange happens at the moment between consumers and producers. Marketers may be able to find ways to help consumers move through the process. When launching a new product, marketing might use advertising messages that trigger the need and show how the product solves customers’ problems. If the customers know about the product but are not buying because they hold unfavourable attitudes towards it, the marketer must find ways to either change the product or change customer perception.
Segmenting consumer markets
Market segmentation is an important aspect of consumer behaviour. It results from a determination of factors that distinguish a certain group of consumers from the overall market. Classifying consumers in this way can help marketers adjust their marketing strategies and implementations, such as advertising, distribution and pricing, to reach target markets more effectively. Depending on its goals and resources, a company may choose to focus on just one segment or several, or implement a mass-market strategy.
There are four commonly used bases for segmenting consumer markets. The first two are geographic and demographic segmentations are physical attribute classification, which refer to the dividing of an overall market into homogeneous groups based on characteristics, such as country region, population location, age, sex, and income lever. On the other hand, psychographic and behavioural segmentations are behavioural or psychological attribute classification, which refer to the dividing of a market into different groups based on social class, lifestyle, personality, or consumer knowledge, attitude, use and response to a product.
Moreover, emerging developments, such as the new emphasis on relationship marketing and the practice of database marketing, mean that marketers pay more attention to the wants and needs of different consumer groups.
Marketing’s impact on consumers
Marketing activities exert an enormous impact on individuals, because everybody is surrounded by marketing stimili in the form of advertisements, shops and products competing consumer’s attention. Especially, marketing can create and communicate popular culture and public policy issues. Hence, marketers should use the marketing tools properly and have responsibilities for the whole society development.
The goal is to get closer to consumers.