Perspectives on ConsumerBehaviour

Chapter 3Advertising And Promotion, 6/E - Belch

Aditya GSN Indrajit Bage N Krishna Chaitanya Neeraj Panghal Prateek Jaiswal Silpa Kamath

Group 8Integrated Marketing Communications

Chapter Objectives

▪ To understand the role consumer behaviour plays in the development and implementation of advertising and promotional programs.

▪ To understand the consumer decision-making process and how it varies for different types of purchases.

▪ To understand various internal psychological processes, their influence on consumer decision making, and implications for advertising and promotion.

▪ To recognize the various approaches to studying the consumer learning process and their implications for advertising and promotion.

▪ To recognize external factors such as culture, social class, group influences, and situational determinants and how they affect consumer behaviour.

▪ To understand alternative approaches to studying consumer behaviour.

An Overview of Consumer Behaviour

▪ Consumer behaviour can be defined as the process and activities people engage in when searching for, selecting, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services so as to satisfy their needs and desires.

▪ For many products and services, purchase decisions are the result of a long, detailed process that may include an extensive information search, brand comparisons and evaluations, and other activities. Other purchase decisions are more incidental and may result from little more than seeing a product prominently displayed at a discount price in a store.

A basic model of consumer decision making

Sources of Problem Recognition

▪ Problem recognition is caused by a difference between the consumer’s ideal state and actual state. A discrepancy exists between what the consumer wants the situation to be like and what the situation is really like.

▪ The major reasons could beOut of Stock Dissatisfaction New Needs/Wants Related Products/Purchases Marketer-Induced Problem Recognition New Products

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

Examining Consumer Motivations

• Hierarchy of Needs

• Psychoanalytic Theory

• Motivation Research in Marketing

Marketing research methods used to probe the

mind of the consumer In-depth interviews Projective techniques Association tests Focus groups

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

Information Search

• Internal search

• External search

Perception

▪ how consumers sense external information

▪ how they select and attend to various sources of information, and

▪ how this information is interpreted and given meaning

Selective Perception Subliminal Perception

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

Ability to perceive a stimulus that is below the level of conscious awareness.

Alternative Evaluation

▪ In this stage, the consumer compares the various brands or products and services he or she has identified as being capable of solving the consumption problem and satisfying the needs or motives that initiated the decision process. The various brands identified as purchase options to be considered during the alternative evaluation process are referred to as the consumer’s evoked set.

▪ Evaluative criteria are the dimensions or attributes of a product or service that are used to compare different alternatives. Evaluative criteria can be objective or subjective.

▪ Many marketers view their products or services as bundles of attributes, but consumers tend to think about products or services in terms of their consequences instead. Functional consequences Psychosocial consequences

▪ Two sub processes are very important during the alternative evaluation stage: • the process by which consumer attitudes are created, reinforced, and changed• the decision rules or integration strategies consumers use to compare brands and make

purchase decisions.

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

Attitudes

▪ A multi attribute attitude model views an attitude object, such as a product or brand, as possessing a number of attributes that provide the basis on which consumers form their attitudes.

Attitude Change Strategies • Identifying an attribute or consequence that is important and remind consumers

how well the brand performs on this attribute• Getting consumers to attach more importance to the attribute in forming their

attitude toward the brand • Emphasize a new attribute that consumers can use in evaluating a brand. • Change consumer beliefs about the attributes of competing brands or product

categories.

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

Integration Processes and Decision Rules

▪ Integration processes are the way product knowledge, meanings, and beliefs are combined to evaluate two or more alternatives.

▪ Sometimes consumers make their purchase decisions using more simplified decision rules known as heuristics.

Purchase Decision

Purchase intention Brand loyalty

Post purchase Evaluation

▪ Possible outcome of purchase is cognitive dissonance, a feeling of psychological tension or post purchase doubt that a consumer experiences after making a difficult purchase choice.

The Consumer Decision-Making Process

▪ The process by which individuals acquire the purchase and consumption knowledge and experience they apply to future related behaviour.”

▪ Two basic approaches to learning are the behavioural approach and cognitive learning theory.

Behavioral Learning Theory

Classical Conditioning Operant Conditioning

The Consumer Learning Process

▪ Cognitive Learning Theory

Behavioural learning theories have been criticized for assuming a mechanistic view of the consumer that puts too much emphasis on external stimulus factors. They ignore internal psychological processes such as motivation, thinking, and perception; they assume that the external stimulus environment will elicit fairly predictable responses.

The cognitive learning process

The Consumer Learning Process

▪ External influences on consumer behaviour

Environmental Influences on Consumer Behaviour

▪ Culture

Cultural norms and values offer direction and guidance to members of a society in all aspects of their lives, including their consumption behaviour.

▪ Subcultures

Marketers develop specific marketing programs for various products and services for these target markets.

Social Class

Social class refers to relatively homogeneous divisions in a society into which people sharing similar lifestyles, values, norms, interests, and behaviours can be grouped

Social class is an important concept to marketers, since consumers within each social stratum often have similar values, lifestyles, and buying behaviour. Thus, the various social class groups provide a natural basis for market segmentation.

Consumers in the different social classes differ in the degree to which they use various products and services and in their leisure activities, shopping patterns, and media habits. Marketers respond to these differences through the positioning of their products and services, the media strategies they use to reach different social classes, and the types of advertising appeals they develop.

Environmental Influences on Consumer Behaviour

▪ Reference Groups

A reference group is “a group whose presumed perspectives or values are being used by an individual as the basis for his or her judgments, opinions, and actions.” Consumers use reference groups as a guide to specific behaviours, even when the groups are not present.

Family Decision Making: An Example of Group Influences

The initiator The information provider The influencer

The decision maker The purchasing agent The consumer

Situational Determinants

Specific usage situation Purchase situation Communications situation.

Environmental Influences on Consumer Behaviour