Chapter 6

Analyzing Consumer
Markets
• Adopting a holistic marketing orientation requires fully understanding
customers - gaining a 360-degree view of both their daily lives and the
changes that occur during their lifetimes so the right products are
always marketed to the right customers in the right way.
What Influences Consumer
Behavior?
• Consumer behavior is the study of how individuals, groups, and
organizations select, buy, use and dispose of goods, services, ideas or
experiences to satisfy their needs and wants.
• Cultural Factors
• Culture - the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behavior
• Social Factors
• Reference group - group that have direct or indirect influence on their
attitudes or behavior
• membership group
• primary group (family, friends, neighbors and coworkers)
• secondary group (religious, professional)
• dissociative group (values and behavior an individual rejects)
• opinion leader (person offers informal advice / information about a product)
• Cliques - small groups whose members interact frequently. Members have
similar, and closeness facilitates effective communication but also insulates
the clique from new ideas.
• Family - family members constitue the most influential primary
reference group
• There are 2 families in the buyer’s life; the family of orientation
consists of parents and siblings. The parents influence on behavior
can be significant.
• A more direct influence on everyday buying behavior is the family of
procreation - namly, the person’s spouse and children.
• Roles and status - we can define a person’s position in each group in
terms of role and status. A role consists of the activities a person is
expected to perform and the each role in turn connotes a status.
Personal Factors
• Age and stage in the life cycle
• Occupation and economic circumstances
• Personality and Self-concept
• Lifestyle and Values
Key Psychological Processes
• Four main psychological processes that affect consumer behavior are
motivation, perception, learning and memory.
• Motivation
• We have needs and some are biogenic and some psychogenic.
• Biogenic arise from physiological states of tension such as hunger, thirst, or
discomfort.
• Psychogenic arise from psychological states of tension such as the need for
recognition, esteem or belonging.
• Sigmund Freud assumed the psychological forces shaping people’s behavior
are largely uncounscious and that a person cannot fully understand his or her
own motivations.
• Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by
particular needs at a particular times.
• Frederick Herzberg developed a two-factor theory that distinguishes
dissatisfiers from satisfiers. The absence of dissatisfiers is not enough
to motivate a purchase; satisfiers must be present. For example:
computer that does not come wiht a warranty is a dissatisfier.
• Perception is the process by which we select, organize and intepret
information inputs to create a meaningful picture of the world.
The Power of Sensory Marketing
• Learning
• induces changes in our behavior arising from experience.
• A drive is a strong internal stimulus impelling action.
• Cues are minor stimuli that determine when, where and how a person responds.
• Emotions
• Consumer response is not all cognitive and rational. Much may be emotional and
invoke different kinds of feelings
• Memory
• Marketing is a way making sure consumers have product and service experiences
that create the right brand knowledge structures and maintain them in memory.
The Buying Decision Process
• 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.
• Postpurchase Behavior
• After the purchase, the consumer might experience dissonance from noticing
certain disquieting features or hearing favorable things about other brands
and will be alert to information that supports his or her decision.
• Postpurchase satisfaction is a function of the closeness between expectations
and the products’s perceived performance.
• dissapointed
• satified
• delighted
• The larger the gab between expectations and performance, the greater the
dissatisfaction.
• Postpurchase Actions
• Satisfied consumer is more likely to purchase the product again and will
recommend to others
• Dissatisfied consumers may abandon or return the product. They may seek
better value in other products or may complain
Behavioral Decision Theory and
Behavioral Economics
• Decision Heuristics
• Availabilty heuristics - consumers base their predictions on the quickness and
ease with which a particular example of an outcome comes to mind. For
example: a recent product failure may lead consumers to inflate the likelihood
of a future product failure
• Representativeness heuristics - consumers base their predictions on how
representative or similar the outcome is to other examples. For example:
Package appearances may be so similar to another brand.
• Anchoring and adjustment heuristic - consumers arrive at an initial judgment
and then adjust it sometimes only reluctantly based on additional
information. (For example: first impression in service marketers)
Framing
• Decision framing is the manner in which choices are presented to
and seen by a decision maker.
• A RM1500 cell phone may not seem that expensive in context of
a RM3500 cell phone but may seem very expensive if other
phones only cost RM800
• Framing effects can be found in comparative advertising.
• Marketers can be very clever in framing decisions. To help
promote its environmentally friendly cars, Volkswagen Sweden
incorporated a giant working piano keyboard into the steps next
to the exit escalator of a Stockholm subway station.
• https://youtu.be/SByymar3bds?si=V8kG4tCkGAgJmr0y
The end of Chapter 6