Understanding Customer Behavior
任維廉 教授
at NCTU, 2012
Outline
1. Marketing’s Customer Focus
2. Importance of Understanding Customer
3. Unit of Analysis
4. Modeling Customer Behavior
5. Forming Attitudes
6. Comparing and Evaluating Alternatives
7. Decision-making Stages
8. Customer Needs
9. Social Systems
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
1. Marketing’s Customer Focus
 Making the entire firm customer oriented!
 Marketing function affects customers more directly than any
other functions.
 Managers throughout the organization must understand what
customer want and will pay for, and must apply this
information creatively in their decision making.
 Marketing is responsible for helping them understand their
effect on customers.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
1. Marketing’s Customer Focus
 4 fundamental objectives:
1. To ensure that customers understand the basic
concept behind a product or service.
2. To show customers the relevance of the firm’s
product or service to their needs.
3. To remove or lower barriers to exchange so that
customers can engage in a transaction with
minimal effort.
4. To develop and manage trustworthy relationships
with customers.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
2. Importance of Understanding Customer
 Rapid social and technological changes, decline and
emerging turnaround of many industries,
 Losing touch with the voice of customer (before their
competitors.
 Managers sometimes assume:
 Their own personal experiences represent a larger market.
 They can treat changes in consumer behavior as isolated
events rather than as part of a complex system of events.
 Research methods and thinking frameworks that have proved
useful in the past are appropriate in the present.
 Customers know why their behavior has changed.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
2. Importance of Understanding Customer
 Decision-making biases:
 Failure of success bias,
 Narrow cognitive peripheral vision.
 Well-educated, hardworking managers failure to:
1. anticipate the possibility of change among customers.
2. detect important changes soon after they occurred.
3. understand this changes once they became painfully event,
4. integrate the voice of customer in key decisions once the
voice was understood.
 Managers must update and reexamine existing
conceptions and assumptions about customers.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
3. Unit of Analysis
Types of
Customers
Household
Individual
Individual
buying
Organizational
Organization
buyer
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Group
Family buying
unit
Buying
center
Key roles
 Opinion leaders: expertise in a specific product category
 Market mavens: generally, broad, cross-category advice.
 Innovators: very first to try.
 Gatekeepers
 Decision makers
 Implementers
 Users
 Marketing as the interface function between the firm and
its customers.
 The effects of marketer-controlled communications on
individuals are moderated by social and cultural
processes.
交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
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4. Modeling Customer Behavior
1. External stimuli (sales call, consumer reports)
2. Internal stimuli (a change in financial circumstance)
3. Decision processes (or defer, pending)
4, Choice outcome (purchase an automobile)
5. Implementation (Buick supplier)
 Customers have learned from their own or others’
experiences. This learning will affect their attention in
future decision processes.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
Past, present and future social events
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
4 Types of Problem-solving Behavior
 Extensive
 Buying a new type of product.
 Limited
 Consumer already know what attributes are important.
 Routinized
 When consumer have had extensive experience purchasing
the same product, and are satisfied with it.
 Exploratory
 New product appeared, customer feel the need to
reevaluate the appropriateness of the current brand.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
5. Forming Attitudes
 Fishbein’s multiattribute attitude model:
 Customer first generate a set of important beliefs about a
brand based on external / internal stimuli.
 They are carried in memory and help customers to
differentiate offerings into acceptable / unacceptable sets.
 Marketers may change customers’ attitudes:
 Make certain attributes more important than others,
 Increase the probability value associated with a positive
evaluated belief,
 decrease the probability value associated with a negative
evaluated belief.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
Fishbein’s multiattribute attitude model
n
A0   bi ei
i 1
where
A0 = attitude toward the object
bi = belief strength assigned to a particular attribute
ei = evaluation assigned to a particular attribute
 = summation of all the product attributes (1 to n)
n
i 1
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
6. Comparing and Evaluating Alternatives
 Simplifying strategies: Customers seemingly have
limited capacities to evaluate and process information.
1. Affect referral (情感回溯): use an evaluation they recall from
the past.
2. Lexicographic heuristic rule (挑選): The alternatives with the
highest rating on the most important attributes is chosen. If two
or more brands perform equal well on this attribute, then choose
the 2nd important attributes.
3. Elimination by aspects model (淘汰): the alternative that
performs most poorly on the highest priority attribute is
eliminated. Then they selects the 2nd important attributes…
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
6. Comparing and Evaluating Alternatives
4.Conjunctive strategy (連結): sets up minimum cutoff points for
each attributes (and). Disjunctive heuristic: or.
5. Linear compensatory model (線性加總): weights are multiplied
by scores, then summed, the highest score is selected. (Fishbein)
6. Phased strategies (兩階段): (1) 連結 /淘汰 to eliminate some
alternatives. (min. time / effort consuming) (2) 線性加總 (max.
accuracy)
7. Marketing implication: use 4 Ps to present products,
 Guiding customers to use a set of heuristics that lead to favorable
evaluation of our products.
 Designing products so as to be viewed favorably in accordance
with heuristics customers already use.
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7. Decision-making Stages
 Hierarchy of effects model:
1. An initial awareness of a product,
2. Development of further knowledge about it,
3. Leads to the creation of certain beliefs about the product,
4. Emergence of particular feelings or affect about it,
5. Translates into some intention to buy,
6. actual purchase behavior.
 Decision-making stages vary according to the
manager.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
8. Customer Needs
 If external / internal stimuli are strong enough, people
will seek more information. e.g. word-of-mouth
communication, product demonstration.
 A performance gap may be perceived between an
actual and a desired state of being: need. Need may
arise from:
1. perceived a better performing alternative,
2. perceived the current product is no longer satisfactory.
 The greater the need, the greater the tendency to
engage in decision processes.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
8. Customer Needs
 Marketing Implications:
 The willingness to seek understanding and use incomplete
information imaginatively is important.
 By carefully examining their own personal experience and
formal research (survey, 顯示性偏好，敘述性偏好,
simulation), managers can:
1. formulate initial ideas,
2. obtain feedback,
3. develop more specific ideas,
4. obtain additional feedbacks,
5. refine ideas …..
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
9. Social Systems
 People tend to differentiate themselves from one
another, and yet to group together on the basis of
important similarities. e.g. 車子，NB.
 Market segments are subsets of customers who are
homogeneous with respect to key thinking, behaviors,
and other characteristics.
 Managers must determine what cultural / subcultural
differences are important, and how to respond to such
differences.
 Universals
 Distinctions
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
9. Social Systems
 Universals
 Human / near universals: traits and behaviors are very nearly
all societies.
 The universals represent a specific need.
1. identifying the relevant universals prior to introducing a
product into a new cultural market.
2. ask whether in each market these universals manifest
themselves in different ways that might changes in marketing
mix.
 Fashion / food products relate to a widely held need of self-
expression may help in developing a common promotional
theme in several countries. (Zara, Nike vs. 李寧)
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A Small Sample of Universals (Brown, 1991)

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
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Use metaphors
Have a system of status and roles
Divide labor by sex and age
Create art and artistic activities
Have standards by which beauty and ugliness are measured
Have followers of leaders who are apathetic, regimented,
“mature,” and autarkic
Believe in the supernatural
Categorize color
Empathize
Dominate
Imagine
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
A Small Sample of Universals (續1)

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




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
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Imitate outside influences
Resist outside influences
Compete individually and in groups
Dance
Sing
Tell tales
Change the language over time
Need novelty
Are curious
Express emotion with our faces
Interpret rather than merely observe human behavior
Envy
交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
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A Small Sample of Universals (續2)

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



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

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Use symbolic means to cope with envy
Exchange
Settle disputes
Reciprocate (in both positive and negative [tit-for-tat] ways)
Associate music with ritual
Distinguish between public and private
Are aggressive
Get anxious
Appreciate aesthetics
Need privacy and silence occasionally
Need to explain the world
Feel pride, shame, amusement, and shock
……
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9. Social Systems
 Distinctions
 While there are important universals among all societies, they
are often expressed or manifested in vary different ways.
 It may have to be designed, delivered and communicated in
different ways with respect to that need.
 Can marketing mix be standardized across international
boundaries?
1. Successful standardization is the exception, not the rule.
2. Some important differentiation is often required particularly
in advertising.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
A Study of Food Tests in 4 Countries
 Nearly all people in all societies have an explicit need
for healthy food products and simultaneous need to
indulge in the pleasures (less healthy) of foods.
 Study 1, survey (same picture in 4 countries)
 When a strawberry was add to a picture of a slice of cake, the
cake was perceived as more appealing (than absent).
 When strawberries were added to a bowl of breakfast cereal,
the cereal was perceived more healthy and natural (than
absent).
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
 Study 2, in-depth interviews
 Strawberry on the cake should be sliced, while remain whole
when presented in the cereal in country A. But in country B,
the reverse should be done.
 There were other fruits that had an even stronger impact.
 Marketing Implications:
 Initial testing implied that a standardized advertising approach
would be warranted.
 By deeper analyses, differentiated promotional strategies in
each country would be significantly more effective.
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授
5. Conclusion
 To understand the voice of customer is a critical first
step.
 Many concepts and tools, with imagination, are
available to help us understand, predict, and influence
customers.
 Back to basics:
沒有人喜歡被業務員施壓推銷，
世界上最好的業務是不賣東西的，他是幫客戶買東西，
故總會先摸清楚客戶為何要買？是否真的需要買？
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交通大學管理學院 任維廉教授