Describe the consumer market and the major factors that influence consumer buyer behavior.
The American consumer market consists of more than 300 million people
who consume more than $14 trillion worth of goods and services each
year, making it one of the most attractive consumer markets in the
world. The world consumer market consists of more than 6.8 billion people who annually consume an estimated $70 trillion worth of goods and services
Consumers
around the world vary tremendously in age, income, education level, and
tastes. They also buy an incredible variety of goods and services. How
these diverse consumers relate with each other and with other elements
of the world around them impacts their choices among various products,
services, and companies. Here we examine the fascinating array of
factors that affect consumer behavior.
Consumers
make many buying decisions every day, and the buying decision is the
focal point of the marketer’s effort. Most large companies research
consumer buying decisions in great detail to answer questions about what
consumers buy, where they buy, how and how much they buy, when they
buy, and why they buy. Marketers can study actual consumer purchases to
find out what they buy, where, and how much. But learning about the whys of consumer buying behavior is not so easy—the answers are often locked deep within the consumer’s mind.
Identify and discuss the stages in the buyer decision process
Marketing
stimuli consist of the Four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion.
Other stimuli include major forces and events in the buyer’s
environment: economic, technological, political, and cultural. All these
inputs enter the buyer’s black box, where they are turned into a set of
observable buyer responses: the buyer’s brand and company relationship
behavior and what he or she buys, when, where, and how often.
The
marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses
inside the consumer’s black box, which has two parts. First, the
buyer’s characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to
the stimuli. Second, the buyer’s decision process itself affects the
buyer’s behavior. We look first at buyer characteristics as they affect
buyer behavior and then discuss the buyer decision process.
Describe the adoption and diffusion process for new products
Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts
in order to discover new products that might be wanted. For example,
the cultural shift toward greater concern about health and fitness has
created a huge industry for health-and-fitness services, exercise
equipment and clothing, organic foods, and a variety of diets. The shift
toward informality has resulted in more demand for casual clothing and
simpler home furnishings
Define the business market and identify the major factors that influence business buyer behavior
Marketers often try to identify opinion leaders for their products and direct marketing efforts toward them. They use buzz marketing
by enlisting or even creating opinion leaders to serve as “brand
ambassadors” who spread the word about their products. Many companies
are now creating brand ambassador programs in an attempt to turn
influential but everyday customers into brand evangelist.
Marketers
are working to harness the power of these new social networks to
promote their products and build closer customer relationships. Instead
of throwing more one-way commercial messages at ad-weary consumers, they
hope to use social networks to interact with consumers and become a part of their conversations and lives.
“Consumers
experience many life-stage changes during their lifetimes,” says
Acxiom. “As their life stages change, so do their behavior and
purchasing preferences. Marketers who are armed with the data to
understand the timing and makeup of life-stage changes among their
customers will have a distinct advantage over their competitors.”
List and define the steps in the business buying decision process
Many
companies employ teams of psychologists, anthropologists, and other
social scientists to carry out motivation research. One ad agency
routinely conducts one-on-one, therapy-like interviews to delve into the
inner workings of consumers. Another company asks consumers to describe
their favorite brands as animals or cars (say, Cadillacs versus
Chevrolets) in order to assess the prestige associated with various
brands. Still others rely on hypnosis, dream therapy, or soft lights and
mood music to plumb the murky depths of consumer psyches.
Such projective techniques seem pretty goofy,
and some marketers dismiss such motivation research as mumbo jumbo. But
many marketers use such touchy-feely approaches, now sometimes called interpretive consumer research, to dig deeper into consumer psyches and develop better marketing strategies.
“Just
between us, most [advertisers] have difficulty getting a 2 percent
increase in sales with the help of $50 million in media and extremely liminal
images of sex, money, power, and other [motivators] of human emotion.
The very idea of [us] as puppeteers, cruelly pulling the strings of
consumer marionettes, is almost too much to bear.”
buying process starts with need recognition—the buyer recognizes a problem or need. The need can be triggered by internal stimuli
when one of the person’s normal needs—hunger, thirst, sex—rises to a
level high enough to become a drive. A need can also be triggered by external stimuli.
Most effective sources, however, tend to be personal. Commercial sources normally inform the buyer, but personal sources legitimize or evaluate products for the buyer.
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