CONSUMER MARKETS AND
CONSUMER BUYER BEHAVIOR
MEHNAAZ SAMANTHA KAMAL
NORTH SOUTH UNIVERSITY
OCTOBER, 2024
OUTLINE
✔ Model of consumer behavior
✔ Characteristics affecting consumer behavior
✔ Types of buying decision behavior
✔ The buyer decision process
✔ The buyer decision process for new products
CHARACTERISTICS AFFECTING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Cultural Factors:
Culture: Learned values, perceptions, wants and
behavior from family and other important institutions
Subculture: Groups of people within a culture with
shared value systems, based on common life
experiences and situations
Social Classes:
Society’s relatively permanent and ordered decisions
whose members share similar values, interests and
behaviors.
Measured by combination of occupation, income,
education, wealth, and other variables.
Social Factors
Group and Social networks
Membership groups:
Groups that have a direct influence and to which a person belongs
Reference groups:
o Serves as direct or indirect points of comparison or reference in forming a
person's attitudes or behavior.
o Can expose a person to new behaviors and lifestyles, influence attitudes and
self concept
o Can create pressure to conform that may affect person’s product and brand
choices
o Often identified by marketers
Word-of-mouth influence and buzz marketing
Opinion leaders:
• People within a reference group, who exert social influence on
others
• Also known as influential or leading adopters
• Identified by marketers as brand ambassadors
Buzz marketing
Online Social Networks:
• Online communities where people socialize or exchange
information and opinions.
• Includes blogs, social networking sites (Facebook), virtual worlds
Social Factors:
Family: the most important consumer buying organization
in society
Social roles and status: the groups, family clubs and
organizations that a person belongs to that can define role
and responsibilities.
Personal Factors:
Age and Lifestyle: Changes over lifetime
Occupation: affects the goods and services bought by
consumers
Economic situation includes trends in :
▪ Personal Income
▪ Savings
▪ Interest rates
Personal Factors:
Lifestyle:
• Pattern of living as expressed in someone's psychographic
• Measures a consumer’s AIOs (activities, interests, opinions)
to capture information about a person’s pattern of acting
and interacting in the environment
Personality: Refers to the unique psychological
characteristics that lead to consistent and lasting responses to
the consumer’s environment
Brand Personality
Psychological Factors
Motivation
• A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing the
person to seek satisfaction
• Motivation research: refers to qualitative research
designed to probe consumers’ hidden,
subconscious motivation
Psychological Factors
Perception: The process by which people select, organize and interpret
information to form a meaningful picture of the world.
3 perceptual processes of consumers:
• Selective attention: tendency to screen out most of the information to
which they are exposed
• Selective distortion: tendency to interpret information in a way that
will support what they already believe.
• Selective retention: consumers are likely to remember good points
made about a brand
Psychological Factors
Learning: the change in an individual’s behavior
arising from experience and occurs through interplay
of:
✔ Drive
✔ Stimuli
✔ Cues
✔ Responses
✔ Reinforcement
Psychological Factors
Belief: Descriptive thought that a person has about something
based on:
• Knowledge
• Opinion
• Faith
Attitude: A person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings
and tendencies toward an object or idea
TYPES OF BUYING DECISION
BEHAVIOR
THE BUYER DECISION PROCESS
Need Recognition occurs when the buyer recognizes a
problem or need triggered by:
• Internal stimuli- hunger, thirst, normal need
• External stimuli- tv ad, magazines, radio, etc
Information Search:
Personal sources: family and friends
Commercial sources: advertising, Internet
Public sources: mass media, consumer organizations
Experimental sources: handling, examining, using
the product
Evaluation of alternatives:
• How consumer processes information to arrive at brand choices
• Depends on individuality, logical thinking, specific buying situation,
careful calculation, etc
Purchase Decision is the act by the consumer to buy the most preferred
brand.
The purchase decision can be affected by
❑ Attitudes of others
❑ Unexpected situation factors
POST PURCHASE DECISION
Post purchase decision: The satisfaction or dissatisfaction that
the consumer feels about the purchase. Relationship between:
• Consumer’s expectations
• Product’s perceived performance
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by a post
purchase conflict.
Customer satisfaction: key to build profitable relationships with
consumers and reap life time value from them.
BUYER DECISION PROCESS FOR
NEW PRODUCTS
Adoption Process: the mental process an individual goes
through from first learning about an innovation to final
regular use.
The stages in the process include:
✔ Awareness
✔ Interest
✔ Evaluation
✔ Trial
✔ Adoption
