Consumer Buyer Behavior

• Consumer buyer behavior is the buying behavior of individuals and households that purchase goods and services for personal use.
• Consumer markets consist of individuals and households that buy or acquire goods and services for personal consumption.

The Model of Buyer Behavior

• Marketing Stimuli: Product, Price, Place, Promotion
• Other Stimuli: Economic, Technological, Social, Cultural
• Buyer's Black Box includes buyer characteristics and the decision process.
• Buyer Responses: Buying attitudes/preferences, Purchase behavior (what, when, where, how much), and Brand engagements/relationships.

Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behavior

• Cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors all influence consumer behavior.

Cultural Factors

• Culture is the set of basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviors learned by a member of society from family and other important institutions.
• Subcultures are groups of people within a culture that have shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations.
• Social Classes are society’s relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviors.
• Social classes are measured as a combination of occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables.
• Major American Social Classes include Upper Class, Middle Class, Working Class, and Lower Class.

Social Factors

• Groups and social networks influence consumer behavior.
• Membership Groups have direct influence.
• Aspirational Groups are groups an individual wishes to belong to.
• Reference Groups form a comparison or reference in forming attitudes or behavior.
• Online social networks, buzz marketing, social media sites, virtual worlds, word-of-mouth, and opinion leaders all contribute.
• Family is the most important consumer-buying organization in society.
• Role and status can be defined by a person’s position in a group.

Personal Factors

• Age and Life-Cycle Stage: PRIZM Lifestage Groups system consists of 66 segments and 11 life-stage groups.
• Occupation affects the goods and service bought by consumers.
• Economic situations include trends in spending, personal income, savings, and interest rates.
• Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her psychographics.
• Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that distinguish a person or group.
• Brand personality traits include sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

Psychological Factors

• Motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs/attitudes affect people's buying choices.
• A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
• Motivation research refers to qualitative research designed to probe consumers' hidden, subconscious motivations.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of needs are arranged in self-actualization needs, esteem needs, social needs, safety needs, and physiological needs.
• Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world.
• Perceptual processes: Selective attention is the tendency to screen out most information. Selective distortion is the tendency to interpret information in a way that supports existing beliefs. Selective retention is the tendency to remember the good rather than the bad.
• Learning is a change in an individual’s behavior arising from experience through drives, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement.
• A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something based on knowledge, opinion, or faith.
• An attitude describes a person's relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or idea.

Types of Buying Decision Behavior

• Complex Buying Behavior is for products that are expensive and risky.
• Dissonance-Reducing Buying Behavior is for products that are expensive but there are few differences between brands.
• Habitual Buying Behavior refers to buying with little brand loyalty.
• Variety-Seeking Buying Behavior is characterized by little loyalty plus a desire to try new things.

The Buyer Decision Process

• The buyer decision process involves need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior.
• Need recognition is the first stage in which the consumer recognizes a problem or need triggered by internal or external stimuli.
• Information search is the buyer decision process stage when the consumer is motivated to search for more information.
• Sources of information include personal, commercial, public, and experiential sources.
• Alternative evaluation is the stage of the buyer decision process in which the consumer uses information to evaluate alternative brands in the choice set.
• Purchase decision is the buyer’s decision about which brand to purchase.
• Purchase intention may differ from the purchase decision due to attitudes of others and/or unexpected situational factors.
• Postpurchase behavior is the stage of the buyer decision process in which consumers take further action after purchase, based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction

Adoption Process for New Products

• The adoption process is the mental process an individual goes through from learning about an innovation to final regular use.
• Stages in the adoption process include awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption.
• Individual differences in innovativeness: innovators, early adopters, early mainstream, late mainstream, and lagging adopters
• New product marketers often target innovators and early adopters to influence later adopters.
• Product characteristics impacting rate of adoption include relative advantage, compatibility, complexity divisibility, and communicability.