Monday, April 09, 2007

Analyzing consumer markets

Marketing concepts -- Chapter 6 -- summary



Consumer behavior is influenced by three factors:

  • cultural -- culture, subculture, and social class
  • social -- reference groups, family, and social roles and statuses
  • personal -- age, stage in life cycle, occupation, economic circumstances, lifestyle, personality, and his 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
  • memory



To understand how consumers actually make buying decisions, marketers must identify who makes and has input into the buying decision; people can be inhibitors, 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
  • post purchase behavior



The marketers job is to understand the behavior at each stage. The attitudes of others, unanticipated situational factors, and perceived risk may all affect the decision to buy, as will consumers level of post-purchase satisfaction and post purchase actions on the part of the company.

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