Marketing Final Exam

ANALYZING CONSUMER MARKETS

 

Consumer behavior is influenced by three factors: cultural (culture, subculture, and social class); social (reference groups, family, and social roles and statuses); and personal (age, stage in the life cycle, occupation, economic circumstances, lifestyle, personality, and self-concept). Research into all these factors can provide marketers with clues to reach and serve consumers more effectively.

Four main psychological processes affect consumer behavior: motivation, perception, learning and memory.

To understand how consumers actually make buying decisions, marketers must identify who makes and has input into the buying decision; people can be initiators, influencers, deciders, buyers, or users. Different marketing campaigns might be targeted to each type of person.

The typical buying process consists of the following sequence of events: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. The marketer’s job is to understand behavior at each stage. The attitudes of others, unanticipated situational factors, and perceived risk may all affect the decision to buy, as will consumers’ levels of post-purchase satisfaction and post-purchase actions on the part of the company.

Consumers will not necessarily go through the buying process in an orderly fashion and make skip and reverse stages and alternate between online and offline shopping.

The attitudes of others, unanticipated situational factors, and perceived risk may all affect the decision to buy, as will consumers’ level of postpurchase product satisfaction, use and disposal, and the company’s actions.

Consumers are constructive decision makers and subject to many contextual influences. They often exhibit low involvement in their decisions.