Consumer Behaviour in Marketing

Under the modern marketing ‘Consumer’ is the fulcrum; he is the life blood; he is very purpose of the business and hence the business firms have to listen consumer voices, ……. Understand his concerns. His needs have to be focused and his respect has to be earned. He has to be closely followed – what he wants……. when, where and how. The new business philosophy is that the economic and social justification of firm’s existence lies in satisfaction of consumer wants. Charles G Mortimer has rightly pointed our that, ‘instead of trying what is easiest for us to make, we must find our much more about what the consumer is willing to buy……. we must apply our creativeness more intelligently to people and their wants and needs rather than to products”. To achieve consumer satisfactions, the marketer should know, understand consumer behaviour – their characteristics, needs, attitudes and so on. But, the study of consumers behaviour is not an easy task as to involves complex system of interaction of various factors namely sociological, cultural, economical and psychological.

FACTORS INFLUENCING CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

Consumers are stimulated by two types of stimuli – internal and environmental. The internal influences comprise of motivation, perception, learning and attitudes – all concepts drawn from the field of psychology. The environmental influences include cultural, social and economical. Experts in these areas attempts to explain why people behave as they do as buyers. All these influences interact in highly complex ways, affecting the individual’s total patterns of behaviour as well as his buying behaviour.

Cultural Factors

Culture is the most fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behaviour. It encompasses set of values, ideas, customs, traditions and any other capabilities and habits acquired by an individual as a member of the society. Each culture contains smaller groups of subcultures such as national culture, religious culture and social class culture that provides more specific identification and socialization for its members. A subculture is a distinct cultural group existing as an identifiable segment within a larger culture. The members of a subculture tend to adhere too many of the cultural mores of the overall society, yet they also profess beliefs, values and customers which set them apart. An understanding of subculture is important to marketing managers because the members of each subculture tend to show different purchase behaviour patterns.

Thus, the Japanese culture provides for certain manners of dressing while the Indian culture provides for different patterns. In the same way one’s religious affiliation may influence one’s market behaviour.

The religious groups such as Hindus, Christians and Muslims posses distinct cultural preferences. For instance, Hindus consider white and black colours inauspicious for brides during marriage; whereas for Christians white is a auspicious bridal dress and black is auspicious for Muslims.

Social class may be brought of as a rather permanent and homogenous group of individuals who have similar behaviour, interests and life-styles. Since people normally choose their friends and associate on the basis of commonality of interests, social classes have a tendency to restrict interactions, especially with regard to social functions. In addition, social classes are hierarchical in nature; thus people usually position their social functions. In addition, social classes are hierarchical in nature; thus people usually position their social group either above or below other groups. Usually social classes are divided into six – upper, lower-upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, upper-lower and lower-lower.

Several research studies have pointed out that differences in consumer behaviour are largely an function of social class. The differences in behaviours can be traces in communication skills, shopping behaviours, leisure activities, saving and spending habits.

Each culture evolves unique pattern of social conduct. The prudent marketer has to analyze these patterns to understand their behaviour to evolve a suitable marketing programme.

Sociological Factors

The sociological factors are another group of factors that affect the behaviour of the buyers. These include reference groups, family and the role and status of the buyers. The reference group are those groups that have a direct or indirect influence on the person’s attitudes, opinions and values. These groups include peer group, friends and opinion leaders. For instance, an individual’s buying behaviour for a footwear could be influenced by his friend, colleague or neighbours. Similarly, Cine stars and Sports heroes are also acting as reference groups to influence buyers. While Cine stars are used to advertise toilet soaps, soft drinks etc., Sports heroes are focused to recommended the products of two wheelers and four wheelers to influence consumers. Also the physicians are used as referees for influencing the consumers of toothpaste.

A more direct influence on buying behaviour is one’s family members namely, spouse and children. The person will have certain position in his family, that is called a status and has a duty assigned – that is role and this status and role also determine buying behaviour. For instance, while buying T.V., clothing and other house-hold appliances, family members have a tremendous role in influencing the buyer behaviour. For example, while buying clothing materials, children may influence parents and parents may influence children.

The marketers, therefore, aim their marketing efforts to reach reference groups and through them reach the potential buyers. The marketer needs to determine which member of a family has the greater influence on the purchase of a particular product and should try to reach to the customer to market his product.

Personal Characteristics

An individual’s buying is also influenced by his personal characteristics such as his age and life cycle stage, occupation, invome and personality. For example, if the target market is kids, their food and other requirements will certainly be different from aged people. Similarly, behaviour and need differs depending on the nature of occupation of the buyers. For example, factory workers and other defence people require footwear of mainly durable type that could withstand serve strain, whereas people with white color jobs require footwear of light and fashionable type. Hence, marketers should by to identify the occupational groups that have interest in their products and services. An organisatoin can even specialize in manufacturing products needed by a particular occupational group.

Basically it is the level of income, its distribution and the consequent purchasing power that determines one’s buying behaviour. Out of the one’s total income, a part may be saved and the remaining part is available for spending. Again out of this, a sizable part has to be reserved for meeting essential expenses and it is only the balance – the individual has the discretion to spend. An intelligent marketer has to watch the income – saving trend of his consumer and basing on that evolve a marketing programme.

Each person has a distinct personality that will influence his buying behaviour. A person’s personality is usually described in terms of such traits as self-confidence, dominance, autonomy and adaptability. Personality can be a useful variable in analyzing consumer behaviour.

Psychological Factors

Psychological characteristics play the largest and most enduring rile in influencing the buyer behaviour. A person’s buying choices re influenced by four major psychological processes – motivation, perception, learning and attitudes.

Motivation is the ‘why’ of behaviour. According to one writer, “motivations refers to the drives, urges, wishes or desire which initiate the sequence of the events knows as behaviour”. Motivation may be conscious or subconscious – a force that underlines a behaviour. It is the complex network of psychological and physiological mechanism. Motives can be instinctive or learned; conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational. The most popular human motivation theories are profounded by Maslow’s, Freuds and Herzberg.

Maslow has classified human needs into five types in the order of importance – basic, safety, social, esteem and self actualization needs. The most urgent motive is acted upon first. If this is fulfilled, the individual proceeds to fulfill the next higher need. It is important for the marketer to understand the motives that lead consumers to make purchases and he must be able to explain the prospective buyers how best his product can satisfy a particular need. But he must be sure that the target consumers have already fulfilled the previous need.

Freud’s Theory deals with sub-conscious factors. He asserts that people are not leaky to be conscious of the real motive guiding their behaviour because these motives are often repressed from their own consciousness. The most important implication of he Freudian model of marketing is that human beings the motivated by symbolic as well as by economic and functional concerns. At times, the marketing analyst must look beyond the apparent reason why an individual purchased a product in order to find the real reason. Only through special methods of probing such as in-depth interviews, projective techniques their motives can really be discovered and understood. The marketer should be aware of the role of visual and tactile elements in triggering deeper emotions that can stimulate or inhibit purchase.

Frederick Herzberg developed a two theory of motivation which distinguishes between dissatisfiers and satisfies. The implication of this theory is that the marketers should do their best to prevent dissatifiers from affecting the buyers and then he should carefully identify the major satisfiers or motivators of purchase.

Perception is the process by which individuals become aware of (though any of the five senses) and give meaning to their environment.

Several technical factors affect the way an object is perceived. These factors do not refer to the product’s technology itself, but rather to how the individual sees the objects. Research studies, for example, have indicated that a large and multicoloured advertisement is perceived more quickly and remembered longer than a small black-and-white advertisement.

A second important factor is the individual’s mental readiness to perceive a product. Research has shown that buyers tend to become “fixed” on a mental image. For example, a consumer may continue to purchase a particular brand even after the consumer knows that a better product can be bought at a lower price. Mental readiness is also affected by the buyer’s level of attention. Generally speaking, people have a limited attention span. That is, human beings only comprehend a limited number of objects or messages in a given amount of time. Also, people’s attention tends to shift quickly form one object to another. These aspects of perception suggest the importance of keeping commercials simple and brief.

Social and cultural factors also shape perception. As already mentioned, culture and social class have a significant effect on how and what consumers purchase. As an illustration, consumers differ as to how important “upward mobility” is to them. Persons interested in climbing the social ladders will perceive certain products as inferior if they feel the members of the upper class do not purchase those products.

Past experience is a fourth factor influencing perception. To illustrate, a person may perceive a brand of toothpaste of high quality simply because of past favourable experience with the product. Finally, the mood of the individual is an important determinant of perception; a person who is unhappy or depressed may find it difficult to see the positive side of a product.

Perception has three basic characteristics: it is subjective, selective and summative. It is subjective because no two individuals perceive the same object in the same way. People tend to see what they want to seen and to hear what they want to hear.

Perception is selective in that only a few of the signals that people receive each day are converted into messages. We receive between 1,500 and 2,000 advertising signals per day through exposure to billboards, store signs. And other forms of mass media. Since it is not possible to deal mentally with so many messages, our minds eliminate most of them from conscious awareness. Because of selective perception, advertising managers must carefully choose their media and the timing and placement of advertise4ments in order to maximize exposure. In addition, if the advertisement is cluttered with many messages, prospective buyers will probably not be able to remember any of them.

Perception is summative in the sense that the reception and recognition of a signal is frequently a function of the cumulative effect of multiple signals. The more often a signal is received, the greater the chance that it will be understood.

Also, t he probability that a receiver will correctly interpret a signal is enhanced if the signal is sent through two or more channels. These two points suggest why television advertisers repeat their commercials frequently. Also the sales person who wants to ensure that a message is understood may send the customer a direct-mail promotion and then visit the customer personally to demonstrate the product.

Learning is the changes that occur in an individual’s behaviour arising from experience. Learning is produced through the interplay of drives, stimuli, cues, responses and reinforcement. A drive is a strong internal stimulus impelling actions and its becomes a motive when it’s directed toward a particular drive-reducing stimulus objects. Cues are minor stimuli the determine when, where and how the person responds. Advertisements frequently serve as cues. If a person is thirty (drive), a soft drink advertisement may encourage the viewer to reduce the dive by taking a soft drink either from the fridge, or visiting nearby cool-drink bar. These cues can influence response, and if the response if positive, the consumer learns about the product and buys it, which means his response is reinforced.

Learning is best studied from the perspective of stimulus-response theory and cognitive theory.

Stimulus-Response Theory: Stimulus response theory had its beginning with the Russian psychologist Pavlov. In his famous experiment, Pavlov range a bell immediately before feeding a dog. Eventually, the dog, associating the sound of the bell with the arrival of dinner, learned to salivate when the bell was rung regardless of whether food was supplied. As result, Pavlov concluded that learning was largely an associative process.

The stimulus-response model has two important implications for marketing. First, when a new product is introduced, the firm should realize that if may have to extinguish brand habits and preferences before attempting to form new buying habits. In this light, the firm will wish to seriously consider the strength of its cues.

The second implications for marketing is that because people are conditioned through repetition and reinforcement, a single cue, such as a television advertisement, may not be sufficient to penetrate an individual’s consciousness. Therefore, it is often necessary to repeat at advertisement a number of times.

Cognitive Theory: Cognitive theorists believe that habits are acquired by insight, thinking and problem solving as well as through a stimulus-response mechanism. From this perspective, the central nervous system and the brain become very important intermediatries in the learning process.

Cognitive theory has several implications for marketing. For example, when the firm is designing a sales strategy, it cannot assume that the consumer is going to buy the product simply because of previous satisfaction with the firm. If the consumer has had successful transactions in the past. This will help the seller, but the buyer can also be expected to evaluate the firm’s product with respect to its merits as well as compare it to competitor’s offerings. Therefore, in situations where cognitive learning is likely to take place, the seller must develop logical presentations which help the potential buyer to evaluate the product in a favourable light.

The practical importance of learning theory for marketers is that they can build up demand for a product by associating it with strong, drives, using motivating cues and providing positive reinforcement.

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An attitude describes a person’s enduring favourable or unfavorable cognitive evaluations, emotional feelings and actions tendencies toward some object or idea. Attitudes put them into a frame of mind of liking and disliking an object, moving toward or away from it. This leads people to behave in fairly consistent way towards similar objects. Hence, the marketer should try to fir his product into existing attitudes rather than to try to change people attitudes.

From the above discussions, it becomes obvious that consumer behaviour is influenced by economic, sociological and psychological factors. But it is wrong to assume that consumer behaviour is influenced by any ‘one’ of these factors. The fact is that at a point of time and in a given set of situations, it is influenced by a sum total of these diverse yet interrelated factors. When a consumer is in the process of taking a purchase decision, all these factors are prove to work simultaneously and influence his choice. But it is possible that the relative importance of these factors vary in a given situation. It is the intelligence of the marketer to find out the nature and intensity of the influence exerted by these factors and to formulate appropriate marketing programme.