Consumer Behavior: An Overview

Consumer Behavior

• The study of how individuals/groups acquire, consume, and dispose of products.

Consumer Behavior Process

• Identify need/desire
• Make a purchase
• Dispose of the product

The Meaning of Consumption

• Brands are bought for their meaning, helping form bonds with those sharing preferences and conveying image/personality.

Consumer Culture Theory (CCT)

• Consumption is a meaning-making process where products/services symbolize personal, social, or cultural identities.
• CCT focuses on consumption's hedonic aspects like emotions, fantasies, and rituals.
• It examines consumer resistance to dominant market ideologies.
• CCT Research uses qualitative methods like ethnography, in-depth interviews, and netnography.

Types of Consumer Decisions

• Habitual/routine decision-making
• Limited decision-making
• Extended decision-making

Habitual/Routine Decision Making

• Involves low-involvement, frequently purchased, low-cost items.
• Requires minimal search/decision effort, and the items are purchased almost automatically.
• Marketers maintain quality, stock, and value for current customers, while breaking normal buying habits for new ones.
• Promotional efforts are used to attract attention, focusing on one message and repeating it often.

Limited Decision-Making

• Used for occasionally bought products, like clothes.
• Requires a moderate amount of information searching, with low to medium involvement.
• These are low to moderate cost goods.
• New brands might be considered.
• Marketers provide reasons to buy, going beyond simple advertisement reminders.

Extended Decision Making

• Characterized by high involvement on expensive/infrequently bought products like laptops or phones.
• Presents economic, performance, and psychological risks.
• Consumers spend considerable time seeking information and deciding.
• Marketers use longer, informative promo messages.
• Efforts must be made to reduce consumers' perceived risk.

Consumer Trends

• Sharing economy provides access over ownership through peer-to-peer transactions on digital platforms
• Authenticity and personalization involves genuine brand communication, tailored products, storytelling, and heritage.
• Diversity and multiculturalism involves inclusive representation, cultural sensitivity and respect, and celebrating diversity
• Healthy and ethical living involves health-conscious choices, sustainable practices, personal wellness, and mental health

Solomon Ch. 1 Key Takeaways

• Consumer behavior includes emotions, identity, and culture
• Consumers co-create brand meaning actively.
• Marketers need awareness of cultural trends/social influences like demographics, brand personality, and the always-on culture.

Solomon Ch. 10: (Buying, Using, Disposing)

• Situational factors influence purchases
• Store layouts and music are designed to influence behavior.
• Post-purchase behavior affects brand loyalty and WOM (word of mouth).

Consumer Decision Making Process

• Problem recognition
  • Occurs when consumers see a significant difference between their current and ideal states.
  • Opportunity recognition: Ideal state moves upward; e.g., wanting a new car.
  • Need recognition: Actual state declines; e.g., running out of gas.

Information Search

• Reduces decision-making risks
  • Financial: e.g., losing money.
  • Functional: e.g., finding alternatives that solve a problem.
  • Physical: e.g., avoiding pain or expending energy.
  • Social: e.g., maintaining social status or avoiding shame.
  • Psychological: e.g., protecting self-esteem.
• Consumers need information to solve problems

Types of Information Search

• Prepurchase search: Consumers seek specific information for a recognized need
• Ongoing search: Consumers browse for fun and stay updated on the market
• Internal search: Scanning memory for product alternatives and past knowledge
• External search: Obtaining product information from ads, friends, or consumer reports
• Deliberate search: Knowledge from directed learning influences choices
• Accidental search: Passive information gained from exposure to ads, packaging, or promotions

Changing Brands

• Occurs even when current brands satisfy needs.
• Can be influenced by mood, low stimulation (sensory-specific satiety).

Sensory-Specific Satiety

• Variety seeking is caused by low environmental stimulation.
• Desire to choose new alternatives over familiar ones

Information Search Factors

• Important purchases and the need to learn drive search.
• Easily obtained information and prior knowledge also contribute.
• Search continues until costs outweigh the utility.

Evaluation of Alternatives: Product Categorization

• Evoked set: Products readily in memory and comparable within the same category
• Consideration set: Products under purchase consideration
• Brands aspire to be in the consumer's evoked set for success.

Product Grouping Implications

• The way a product is grouped impacts who the competitors are
• It also affects what criteria consumers will use to make their choice.

Evaluation of Product Positioning

• Convincing customers that a product belongs in the evoked set

Consideration Sets

• These are usually small

Contextual Brand Choices

• Casual dinner wine: choose affordable and available brand
• Romantic dinner: choose more refined brand
• Party gift: choose prestigious brand
• Brand choices are contextual

CEPs (Category Entry Points)

• These are triggers that prompt consumers to consider purchasing within a category.
• Brands aim to build mental availability by connecting to as many CEPs as possible.

Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect

• Conscious thinking benefits simple choices, although it is inefficient for complex ones due to its limited capacity

Deliberation-Without-Attention Hypothesis

• Example: distracted group chose more desirable car than group that consciously thought about it

Predictions

• Decisions made after unconscious thought are superior to those after conscious thought.
• The quality of unconscious decisions improves with longer periods of unconscious thought.
• Unconscious thought proves better in real-life decision problems.
• Unconscious thought uses an optimal, weighting strategy.

Solomon Additions (Ch. 9)

• Maximizers seek the best, and satisficers settle for good enough.
• Heuristics (rules of thumb) guide decisions (e.g., buying the cheapest).

Motivation

• Inner state of tension that drives goal-directed behavior

Motivation Process

• Triggered by a need (discrepancy between actual and desired state)
• Drives consumers to reduce the tension

Classifying Consumer Needs

Thematic Apperception Technique (TAT)

• This is a projective method to uncover psychogenic needs.
• It involves asking "What's happening?" and "What are they thinking?"

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Pyramid)

• Physiological
• Safety
• Belongingness
• Esteem
• Self-actualization
• Lower needs must be satisfied before progressing to higher levels.
• Criticized for being culture-bound and individualistic.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan)

• Three universal psychological needs
  • Autonomy: control over actions (personal growth)
  • Competence: mastery and effectiveness (choice)
  • Relatedness: social connection
• Intrinsic motivation is better than external rewards

Approach Vs. Avoidance

• These are key strategies for how consumers attain their goals and manage conflict.
• Approach Motivation: Involves pursuing positive outcomes
• Avoidance Motivation: Involves avoiding negative outcomes

Cognitive Dissonance

• This is discomfort after difficult approach-approach decisions.
• Justifying the chosen option can resolves it

Interpersonal Conflicts

• Emotions will drive the motivation in want conflicts
• Duty and obligation will drive motivation in should conflicts
• These conflicts influence self-control and mindfulness

Involvement

• Perceived personal relevance of a product or decision.

Influencing Factors

• Person factors: include interest, values and importance
  • Specific life stage needs
  • Important reasons to purchase
  • Product category involvement
  • Value alignment
• Product factors: include alternatives, source and content of communication
  • Differentiation of alternatives
  • Media to convey information
  • Content of medium should inform, inspire, and engage
• Situational factors: include time, context, and purpose
  • Timeliness or urgency of product
  • Context of use
  • Reason for purchase

Levels of Involvement

• Low Involvement: Habitual inertia
• High Involvement: Passion, loyalty, cult

High Vs Low Involvement

• Low Involvement: Limited info search, E.g., tissues, detergent
• High Involvement: Active info processing, E.g., car, smartphone

Strategies To increase involvement

• Appeal to hedonistic needs with sensory details
• Use novel stimuli with unusual cinematography and sudden silences
• Prominent stimuli relies on larger ads and more color
• Use celebrity endorsers (can be adrawback)
• Build a bond with consumers through an ongoing relationship

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

• (Rahimi et al., 2019)
• Explains consumer persuasion levels.

Rahimi Et Al, Web Ads & ELM

• Central and peripheral cues influence attitudes towards web advertising (ATWA)
• Consumers use different cues (central or peripheral) to form their attitudes towards web advertising

Bonus Insight from Solomon (Ch. 5–6)

• Needs motivate behaviors and goals
• Consumers alternate between utilitarian and hedonic motices
• Brands can link identity, self-expression, and emotions to increase involvement

Perception

• Interpretation and organization of selected sensations

Pyramid of Perception

• We selectively filter what is perceived

Stages of Perception

• Exposure: Engage senses
• Attention: Allocate mental energy
• Interpretation: Give meaning to Stimulus

Marketing Senses

Exposure

• Occurs when a stimulus comes within the range of someone's sensory receptors.

Thresholds

• Absolute: Detect a stimulus
• Differential: Detect changes

JND

• Just Noticeable Difference
• Useful marketing tool for price/packaging changes

Subliminal

• Below absolute threshold

Classic (Fake)

• Vicary (1957): Flashing “Drink Coke!” boosts sales -was admitted hoax

Unconscious

• Above threshold, not attended to Examples:
  • Priming (e.g. Holland et al. citrus scent / Bear/zoo)
  • Background music (e.g. North et al.)

Attention

• Devote processing activity to Stimulus

Perceptual Selections

• Attend to only a small portion of stimuli Influenced by:
  • Position: Central page, Eye-level
  • Size
  • Color

Eye-Tracking Research

• Scan left to right, top to bottom
• Faces and movement grabs attention
• Allows for optimization of product placement

Interpretation

• Assign meaning to what we attend to

Chunking

• A means to simplify incoming stimuli for easier processing

Gestalt Principles

• Key laws describing how consumers perceive object

Key Principles

• Similarity: Group like items together
• Closure: Fill in missing information
• Figure-Ground: Focus one part of the scene by subduing the rest

Memory

• It is the process of "acquiring and storing information so it can be retrieved when needed."

Memory Process

• 1. Sensory input
• 2. Encoding
• 3. Storage
• 4. Retrieval

Associative Networks

• Memory of Interconnected Nodes
• Concepts linked both by semantic or emotional
• Ex. "Perfume" linking to "Chanel,” then "Nicole Kidman," leading to "Sexy,” and finding "Australia"

Memory in Marketing

• One way marketers enhance encoding is by chunking