Chapter 1
Consumers Rule
By Michael R. Solomon
Consumer Behavior
Buying, Having, and Being
Sixth Edition
1-1
Opening Vignette: Gail
• What useful ways can marketers categorize
Gail as a consumer?
• How do others influence Gail’s purchase
decisions?
• What role did brand play in Gail’s surfing
habits?
• What other factors influence Gail’s evaluation
of products?
1-2
What is Consumer Behavior?
• Consumer Behavior:
– The study of the processes involved when individuals or
groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products,
services ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires
• Role Theory:
– Identifies consumers as actors on the marketplace stage
• Consumer Behavior is a Process:
– Exchange: A transaction in which two or more
organizations give and receive something of value
1-3
Some Issues That Arise During Stages in
the Consumption Process
Figure 1.1
1-4
Consumer Behavior Involves
Many Different Actors
• Consumer:
– A person who identifies a need or desire, makes a
purchase, and then disposes of the product
• Many people may be involved in this sequence of
events.
– Purchaser / User / Influencer
• Consumers may take the form of organizations
or groups.
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Consumers’ Impact on
Marketing Strategy
• Market Segmentation:
– Identifies groups of consumers who are similar to
one another in one or more ways and then devises
marketing strategies that appeal to one or more
groups
• Demographics:
– Statistics that measure observable aspects of a
population
• Ex.: Age, Gender, Family Structure, Social Class and
Income, Race and Ethnicity, Lifestyle, and
Geography
1-6
A Lesson Learned
• Nike was forced to pull
this advertisement for a
running shoe after
disabilities rights groups
claimed the ads were
offensive.
• How could Nike have
done a better job of
getting its message
across without offending
a powerful demographic?
1-7
Market Segmentation
Finely-tuned marketing
segmentation strategies
allow marketers to
reach only those
consumers likely to be
interested in buying
their products.
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Consumers’ Impact on
Marketing Strategy (cont.)
• Relationship Marketing: Building
Bonds with Consumers
– Relationship marketing:
• The strategic perspective that stresses the long-term,
human side of buyer-seller interactions
– Database marketing:
• Tracking consumers’ buying habits very closely, and
then crafting products and messages tailored
precisely to people’s wants and needs based on this
information
1-9
Marketing’s Impact on Consumers
• Marketing and Culture:
– Popular Culture:
• Music, movies, sports, books, celebrities, and other
forms of entertainment consumed by the mass
market.
– Marketers play a significant role in our view of the
world and how we live in it.
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Popular Culture
Companies often create product icons to develop an
identity for their products. Many made-up creatures and
personalities, such as Mr. Clean, the Michelin tire man and
the Pillsbury Doughboy, are widely recognized figures in
popular culture.
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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Meaning of Consumption
• The Meaning of Consumption:
– People often buy products not for what they do,
but for what they mean.
– Types of relationships a person may have with a
product:
•
•
•
•
Self-concept attachment
Nostalgic attachment
Interdependence
Love
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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Meaning of Consumption (cont.)
• Consumption includes intangible
experiences, ideas and services in
addition to tangible objects.
• Four types of Consumption Activities:
–
–
–
–
Consuming as experience
Consuming as integration
Consuming as classification
Consuming as play
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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Global Consumer
• By 2006, the majority of people on earth
will live in urban centers.
• Sophisticated marketing strategies
contribute to a global consumer culture.
• Even smaller companies look to expand
overseas.
• Globalization has resulted in varied
perceptions of the United States (both
positive and negative).
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The Global Consumer
American products like Levi jeans are in
demand around the world.
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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers:
Virtual Consumption
• The Digital Revolution is one of the most
significant influences on consumer behavior.
• Electronic marketing increases convenience
by breaking down the barriers of time and
location.
• U-commerce:
– The use of ubiquitous networks that will slowly but surely
become part of us (i.e., wearable computers, customized
advertisements beamed to cell phones, etc.)
• Cyberspace has created a revolution in C2C
(consumer-to-consumer) activity.
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Blurred Boundaries
Marketing and Reality
• Marketers and consumers coexist in a
complicated two-way relationship.
• It’s increasingly difficult for consumers to
discern the boundary between the
fabricated world and reality.
• Marketing influences both popular culture
and consumer perceptions of reality.
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Blurred Boundaries
Marketing managers
often borrow imagery
from other forms of
popular culture to
connect with an
audience. This line of
syrups adapts the “look”
of a pulp detective
novel.
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Marketing Ethics and Public Policy
• Business Ethics:
– Rules of conduct that guide actions in the
marketplace
– The standards against which most people in the
culture judge what is right and what is wrong, good
or bad
• Notions of right and wrong differ among
people, organizations, and cultures.
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Needs and Wants:
Do Marketers Manipulate Consumers?
• Consumerspace
• Do marketers create artificial needs?
– Need: A basic biological motive
– Want: One way that society has taught us that need can be
satisfied
• Are advertising and marketing necessary?
– Economics of information perspective: Advertising is an
important source of consumer information.
• Do marketers promise miracles?
– Advertisers simply don’t know enough to manipulate
people.
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Discussion Question
• This ad was created
by the American
Association of
Advertising Agencies
to counter charges
that ads create
artificial needs.
• Do you agree with the
premise of the ad?
Why or why not?
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Public Policy and Consumerism
• Consumer efforts in the U.S. have contributed
to the establishment of federal agencies to
oversee consumer-related activities.
–
–
–
–
–
Department of Agriculture
Federal Trade Commission
Food and Drug Administration
Securities and Exchange Commission
Environmental Protection Agency
• Culture Jamming:
– A strategy to disrupt efforts by the corporate world to
dominate our cultural landscape
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission
1 - 23
Culture Jamming
• Adbusters Quarterly
is a Canadian
magazine devoted to
culture jamming. This
mock ad skewers
Benetton.
1 - 24
Consumerism and
Consumer Research
• Kennedy’s “Declaration of Consumer Rights”
(1962)
• Green Marketing:
– When a firm chooses to protect or enhance the natural
environment as it goes about its activities
• Reducing wasteful packaging
• Donations to charity
• Social Marketing:
– Using marketing techniques to encourage positive activities
(e.g. literacy) and to discourage negative activities (e.g.
drunk driving)
1 - 25
Consumer Related Issues
• UNICEF sponsored this advertising campaign against child labor.
The field of consumer behavior plays a role in addressing important
consumer issues such as child exploitation.
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The Dark Side of
Consumer Behavior
• Consumer Terrorism:
– An example: Susceptibility of the nation’s food
supply to bioterrorism
• Addictive Consumption:
– Consumer addiction:
• A physiological and/or psychological dependency on
products or services
• Compulsive Consumption:
– Repetitive shopping as an antidote to tension,
anxiety, depression, or boredom
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The Dark Side of
Consumer Behavior (cont.)
• Consumed Consumers:
– People who are used or exploited, willingly or not, for
commercial gain in the marketplace
• Illegal Activities:
– Consumer Theft:
• Shrinkage: The industry term for inventory and cash
losses from shoplifting and employee theft
– Anticonsumption:
• Events in which products and services are
deliberately defaced or mutilated
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Consumer Behavior
As a Field of Study
• Consumer behavior only recently a
formal field of study
• Interdisciplinary influences on the
study of consumer behavior
– Consumer behavior studied by researchers from
diverse backgrounds
– Consumer phenomena can be studied in different
ways and on different levels
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Journal of Consumer Research
1 - 30
The Pyramid of Consumer Behavior
Figure 1.2
1 - 31
Consumer Behavior Disciplines
• The Issue of Strategic Focus
– Should CB have a strategic focus or be studied as a
pure social science?
• The Issue of Two Perspectives on
Consumer Research
– Positivism (modernism):
• Paradigm that emphasizes the supremacy of human
reason and the objective search for truth through
science
– Interpretivism (postmodernism):
• Paradigm that emphasizes the importance of
symbolic, subjective experience and meaning is in
the mind of the person
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Positivist vs. Interpretivist Approaches to CB
1 - 33
Taking it From Here:
The Plan of the Book
•
•
•
•
•
Section I – Consumer Behavior
Section II – Consumers as Individuals
Section III – Consumers as Decision Makers
Section IV – Consumers and Subcultures
Section V – Consumers and Culture
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The Wheel of Consumer Behavior
Figure 1.3
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