5-1
Chapter 5
Understanding Buyer
Behavior and the
Communication Process
5-2
• Describe the four stages of consumer decision making.
• Explain how consumers adapt their decision-making processes based on
involvement and experience.
• Discuss how brand communication influences consumers’ psychological
states and behavior.
• Describe the interaction of culture and advertising.
• Explain how sociological factors affect consumer behavior.
• Discuss how advertising transmits sociocultural meaning in order to sell
things.
5-3
Consumers as Decision Makers
• Marketers need a keen understanding of their consumers as a basis for effective
brand communication.
• This understanding begins with a view of consumers as systematic decision
makers who follow a predictable process in making choices among products and
brands.
• Stage 1—The process begins when consumers perceive a need (functional
or emotional).
• Stage 2—It proceeds with a search for information (internal or external) that
will help in making an informed choice through alternative evaluation
(structured by the consideration set and by applying evaluative criteria).
• Stage 3—The search-and-evaluation stage is followed by purchase.
• Stage 4—Then, in postpurchase use and evaluation, cognitive dissonance
can be encountered and customer satisfaction is ultimately determined.
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Modes of Decision Making
• Some purchases are more important to people than others, a fact that adds
complexity to consumer behavior.
• To accommodate this complexity, marketers think about the level of involvement
that attends any given purchase.
• High or low involvement and experience with a product or service category
determine the mode of consumer decision making:
• Extended problem solving—high involvement, low experience
• Limited problem solving—low involvement, low experience
• Habit or variety seeking—low involvement, high experience
• Brand loyalty—high involvement, high experience
• Experience refers to a consumer’s familiarity with a product of service.
• Involvement refers to the personal importance placed on the choice of product or
service.
5-5
Key Psychological Processes
• Brand messages are developed to influence the way people think about products
and brands, specifically their beliefs and brand attitudes.
• Marketers use multi-attribute attitude models (MAAMs) to help them ascertain the
beliefs and attitudes of target consumers. A MAAMs analysis has four main
components; the evaluative criteria, importance weights, consideration set, and
beliefs.
• Executing a MAAMs analysis involves:
• Step 1—specify evaluative criteria for relevant brands
• Step 2—ask consumers to rate brands against criteria
• Step 3—identify salient beliefs
• Step 4—develop promotional response (correct misperceptions, increase
importance of evaluative criteria, change product to satisfy evaluative criteria)
• Consumers in-turn employ perceptual defenses (cognitive consistency impetus,
selective attention) to ignore or distort most of the commercial messages
(advertising clutter) to which they are exposed.
• When consumers are not motivated to process an advertiser’s message
thoughtfully, the marketer may need to feature peripheral cues as part of the
message (Elaboration Likelihood Model or ELM).
5-6
Consuming in the Real World
Culture and Advertising
• Advertisements are cultural products, and culture provides the context in which an
ad will be interpreted.
• Marketers who overlook the influence of culture are bound to struggle in their
attempt to communicate with the target audience.
• Culture is based on values, which are enduring beliefs that shape more-transitory
psychological states, such as brand attitudes. Within a culture, individuals share
patterns of behavior, or rituals. Violating cultural values and rituals is a sure way to
squander advertising dollars.
• Advertising and other elements of the promotional mix turn products into brands
when they wrap brands with cultural meaning.
• Brands with high cultural capital are worth more. In these ways, brands are cocreated by consumers and marketers.
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Consuming in the Real World, Continued
• Consumer behavior is an activity that each person undertakes before a broad
audience of other consumers.
• Families (intergenerational effect, life stage), race and ethnicity, geopolitics,
gender, and community (brand communities) are important influences on
consumption.
• Who consumers are—their identity—is changeable; through what they buy and
use, consumers can rapidly and frequently change aspects of who they are.
• Celebrities influencers are particularly important in this regard.
5-8
Advertising, Social Rift, and
“Revolution”
• Consumers sometimes use their consumption choices to stake out a position in a
“revolution” of some sort, such as youth culture or political-social movements.
• Marketers should remember that anytime there is a time of great change, many
new opportunities are opened up.
5-9
How Ads Transmit Meaning
• Advertising transfers a desired meaning to the brand by placing the brand within a
carefully constructed social world represented in an ad, or “slice of life.”
• Marketers paint a picture of the ideal social world, with all the meanings they
want to impart to their brand.
• The brand is carefully placed in that picture, and the two (the constructed
social world and the brand) rub off on each other, becoming a part of each
other.
• Meaning is thus transferred from the ad’s constructed social world to the
brand.
• Anthropologist Grant McCracken refers to this as the “movement of meaning” and
created a model to illustrate the process.