ICU: INTRODUCTION TO MARKETING
Vladimir V. Bulatov. bbe@voliacable.com
We, Fr 8:30
LECTURE 8. FINAL CONSUMER BEHAVIOR.
Reading: Ch. 6., addendum sent onto your e-mails.
FINAL CONSUMER BEHAVIOR represents the actions a person takes part in when
purchasing and using products and services, including mental and social processes that
precede and follow these actions.
PURCHASE DECISION PROCESS (consists of 5 steps).
1. Problem recognition: perceiving a need.
(How to activate the decision process? -To show the shortcomings of the products a
potential consumer may own (e.g. advertisement of a new car, where a comparison
with old or competing models is presented).
2. Information search.
Here is applicable the analogy to secondary and primary information: first we use
secondary info (internal search); if it is not sufficient – consumer explores the
surrounding world (external search).
Sources of external information:
- personal sources (relatives and friends);
- public sources (various product rating magazines, reports, etc.);
- marketer-dominated information (advertisements, salespeople, PoS terminals, etc).
3. Alternative evaluation: assessing value.
Includes:
a. selecting potential brands;
b. forming evaluation criteria;
c. evaluating brands and forming an evoked set of potential products.
4. Purchase decision: buying value.
a. from whom to buy;
b. when to buy.
(such factors as place, atmosphere, salesperson’s persuasiveness, financial
obstacles have influence on where and when to make a purchase)
5. Postpurchase behavior: value in consumption or use.
(Comparison of what was expected with what was actually purchased).
Dissatisfaction of consumer may be caused either by:
a. deficiency of a product (remedy – redesign);
b. too high consumer expectations (remedy – change AD or sales policy).
Important facts about customer satisfaction:
1. satisfied customers tell to 8 more people about their experience, dissatisfied people share negative
impression with 22 persons!!!;
2. AD campaigns aimed at cognitive dissonance reduction try to increase subjective customer
satisfaction.
The 5-step process sometimes shrinks into a shorter sequence, depending on the level of
involvement and personal, social, and economic significance of a purchase to a consumer.
Cheap products are rarely assessed on the full 5-step scheme; however, expensive
purchases are done with all 5 steps involved.
Different consumer product types generate different approaches to problem solving:
- routine problem solving (need to buy milk);
- limited problem solving (in what restaurant to go);
- extended problem solving (purchase of a car…).
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Introduction to marketing. Consumer behavior I
INFLUENCES ON THE CONSUMER PURCHASE DECISION PROCESS.
(Figure 6-4 on page 157).
1. Marketing mix influences (most obvious sources of influence).
2. Situational Influence.
(Includes:
- purchase task (either it is a gift, a necessity, or an entertainment, etc);
- social surroundings (other people present, when purchase is made [who also may
have effect on what is purchased]);
- physical surroundings (decor, music, crowding in store, etc);
- temporal effects;
- antecedent states (how much money on hand, mood, etc.).
3. Psychological influences:
a. Motivation.
- Maslow’s motivation theory (bottom level needs must be satisfied before upper will
become important);
- Freud’s motivation theory (ID – cauldron of desires, EGO – conscious me,
SUPEREGO – norms and laws)
(How marketing can be applied here? The further humanity progresses – the less
conservative it becomes. Once certain desire becomes a norm, new products appear to
satisfy this new necessity).
b. Personality (person’s consistent behavior or responses to recurring situations: e.g.
aggressive, extra-/intravert, dominating, compliant, assertive, negative, etc.).
Some researches demonstrate that certain personality traits refer to similar typical
preferences (e.g. aggressive people use razors [not electric shavers], purchase
signature goods, such as Gucci, YSL, etc. to underline their importance). Often
nations have typical personality traits.
(Important: recent researches demonstrated low correlation b/w personality and
purchasing behavior).
c. Perception (the process by which an individual selects, organizes and interprets
information to create meaningful picture of the world).
Selective perception (major subconscious brain feature of choosing needful
information) consists of 3 steps:
- selective exposure (it is more likely to see McDonald’s AD on a road when you are
hungry then otherwise);
- selective comprehension (interpreting info in consistency with man’s attitudes and
beliefs: e.g. often AD promotion images screw up the whole idea of a product: e.g. a
bunny on Duracell’s batteries was misinterpreted not as a challenger, but as a toy
which is to be powered up by this brand of batteries);
- selective retention (forgetting different kinds of info with different speed. Marketing
aim in this case is to force potential consumers to remember the AD info as long as
possible.
(One more important notion goes here. Subliminal perception: hearing and memorizing
info not even being aware of it [e.g. 25th effect]).
Also, perception of risk by consumers is to be alleviated by proper marketing of a
product: e.g. certificates of product’s quality, free trials, warranties and guarantees, etc.
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Introduction to marketing. Consumer behavior I
d. Learning.
(1) Behavioral learning through drive-cue(stimulus)-response-reinforcement pattern
a man builds a sort of psychological tradition (e.g. brand loyalty). Marketers can
extrapolate the influence of already working stimuli (i.e. popular brands) and
position them to another drive-cue-response-reinforcement patterns [e.g.
extrapolation of Tylenol at Tylenol Cold&Flu, Tylenol P.M. etc]).
(2) Cognitive learning (building in mind certain cause-and-effect relationships and
impressions through observations).
e. Values, beliefs and attitudes (what consumers “think”).
Attitude – learned predisposition to respond to an object or a class of objects in a
consistently favorable or unfavorable way. Attitudes are shaped by our values and
beliefs, which in turn are also learned but during a longer period.
f. Lifestyle (what consumers “do”). Lifestyle is identified by how individuals spend their
time and resources (activities), what they consider important in their environment
(interests), and what they think of themselves and the world around them
(opinions). Lifestyle analysis makes possible to create public profiles which can be
used for targeting and positioning different goods.
(Fig. 6-7 shows one of the approaches in differentiating lifestyles).
SOCIOCULTURAL INFLUENCES WILL BE COVERED ON THE NEXT LECTURE. ALSO,
INDUSTRIAL BUYER BEHAVIOR WILL BE ANALYSED.
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Introduction to marketing. Consumer behavior I