Understanding Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior Intro

• Marketing professionals want to understand what, why, and how consumers make purchasing decisions

Consumer Behavior

• Consumer behavior encompasses why individuals or groups acquire, consume, and dispose of products
• Stages include identifying a need/desire, making a purchase, and disposing of the product

Key People in Consumer Behavior

• Includes users, purchasers, influencers, family, and designers

Why Consumer Behavior is Important

• Can greatly impact marketing strategies
• Firms exist to address consumer needs
• Helps manufacturers understand consumer motivations for buying

Consumption Meaning

• Consumption goes beyond the functionality of the product
• Forms bonds through shared preferences
• Conveys image or personality

Anatomy of a Supermarket Purchase

• Unconscious mind activates autopilot
• Default selections are those received unless actively changed
• Willpower controls temptation, lowered willpower leads impulsive decisions

Types of Consumer Decisions

• Differ based on involvement, effort, and frequency

Habitual/Routine Decision Making

• Involves low involvement, frequent purchases, and low-cost items
• Requires little search or decision-making
• Purchases made almost automatically

Marketer's Tasks - Habitual/Routine

• Maintain brand quality, stock, and value for current customers
• Break normal buying habits for new customers
  • Use prime to call attention
  • Focus ads/promos on one message
  • Repeat messages often

Limited Decision Making

• Occurs when buying products occasionally
• Requires moderate information searching
• Involves low to medium involvement and cost

Marketer's Tasks - Limited

• Offer reasons for choosing their brand, beyond simple reminders
• Follow the Nike model of finding greatness

Extended Decision Making

• Characterized by high involvement, expensive/infrequent products, and high risk
• Involves spending time seeking information and making decisions

Marketer's Tasks - Extended

• Promo messages should be informative and long
• Work to reduce perceived consumer risk

Consumer Decision-Making Process: Problem Recognition

• Occurs when consumers see a gap between their current and ideal state
  • Opportunity recognition involves elevating the ideal state
  • Need recognition involves declining the current state
• Marketers operate under the assumption of a need

Consumer Decision-Making Process: Information Search

• Reduces financial, functional, physical, social, and psychological risks
• Consumers requires information to make a purchasing decision
  • Prepurchase search fulfills an identified need
  • Ongoing search fulfills the fun of browsing and staying updated

Types of Information Search

• Internal search involves memory recall
• External search involves collecting new information from the environment
• Deliberate search involves directed learning
• Accidental search involves information acquired passively

Consumer Considerations: Changing Brands

• Brand switching involves alternating even if satisfied
• Sensory-specific satiety involves seeking variety when surroundings are not stimulating

Searching for Information

• Search based on an important purchase, a need for learning, ease of information, past knowledge
• Search continues until outweighed by the cost of searching

Evaluation of Alternatives - Product Categorization

• Important to understand
• Evoked set: products already in memory and comparable
• Consideration set: products being actively considered for purchase

Building Brand Consideration

• The success of a brand relies on its ability to belong to the consumer's evoked set
• Brands can be positioned into a way that makes them able to be in the evoked set
• Products in the evoked set share similar characteristics
• Consumers will categorize new products based on prior knowledge
• Understanding how a consumer encodes the information can be important to understanding the cognitive structure

Elements of Product Positioning

• Requires convincing consumers a product belongs in a particular category
• Orange juice was successfully repositioned as an everyday drink, rather than just for breakfast

Decision Making and Post-Purchase Behavior

Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect

• Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, van Baaren (2005) researched it
• The study divided the participants into two groups
  • Thinking, consciously
  • Distracted-thinking, completing a task to distract from thinking

Effects of Thought on Decisions

• Conscious thought enhances simple decisions
• Unconscious thought enhances complex decisions
• It isn't always the best idea to overthink a complex problem, the quality of decisions decrease when the task get too complex

Criticism of Dijksterhuis - The Huizinga Studies

• Huizinga et al. (2012) didn't replicate his findings
• Huizinga's stated predictions
  • Decisions are better after unconscious thought
  • Unconscious decision improves as duration increases
  • Unconscious thought is superior even with real-world problems
  • Unconscious follows weighting strategy

Huizinga Studies

• Method replicaated Dijksterhuis
• Results prediction 1: No notable differences in correct decisions
• Results prediction 2: No significant better performance when unconscious duration last for 2, 4, or 8 minutes
• Conclusion: No proof for predictions 1 and 2

Huizinga studies - extra method

• Method: Dijksterhuis replication but allowed conscious access to info
• Result: conscious thought beats unconscious thought
• Conclusion: refutes prediction 3

Huizinga - Rating Method

• Method: rate cars on a 1-10 scale
• Results: the weighting matches lexicographic strategy
• Conclusion: no proof on prediction 4

Huizinga - weight cars

• Mathod: replication of Dijksterhuis by using weighting strategies such as best fit
• Result: Conscious vs unconscious make no differnce
• Conclusion: No proof to prediction 4

Thought types

• Lexicographic strategy: conscious thought
• Weighting strategy: unconscious thought

Motivation and End-State Goals

• Motivation occurs when tension drives people toward a end-state
• Motivation is an inner state of tension that drives a person to pursue a goal (desired end state)

Consumer Needs

• Motivation stems from recognizing and satisfying a need
• The need is a gap between desired and current states
• Inner tension drives consumers to eliminate the need

Motivation and Marketing

• Products/services are created to satisfy needs and lower tension

Types of Needs

• Biogenic: needs to stay alive
• Psychogenic: influenced by culture
• Utilitarian: practical
• Hedonic: experiential with emotional response

Ways to Classify Consumer Needs

• Thematic Apperception Technique (TAT) involves 20 psychogenic needs and description tests of emotion
• Maslow's hierarchy is biogenic and psychogenic needs that progresses to the next stage

Criticisms of Maslows Hierarchy

• May be too culture-bound, individual needs over group

Self Determination Theory (SDT)

• Derived from Ricard's work to explain peoples lives:
  • Competence or mastery, personal growth
  • Autonomy or controlling their lives, choice
  • Relatedness or connection with others and a feeling or ability to care for others

Purchase Motives

• Pursuing positive outcomes: approach motivation
• Avoiding negative outcomes: avoidance motivation

Multi-Motive Purchases

• Purchases can involve more than one motive, creating conflict

Three Types of Motivational Conflicts

• Approach-Approach involves desirable alternatives.
  • Marketers resolve by combining options
  • May create tension because only one item can be bought. Cogonitive dissonance is reduced by seeking positive reinforcement post purchase
• Approach-Avoidance
  • Desire and aversion, a a marketing to balance with multiple purchase options
• Avoidance-Avoidance
  • Undesirable alternatives

Want Conflicts

• Involves wanting something more
• Occurs with work/study
  • Involves being tempted, emotionally charged

Should Conflicts

• involves needing to do something else
• Occurs mostly with leisure time and feeling obligated
  • Creates pressure to do something other than the desired task

Motivation in Want vs Should Conflicts

• Motivations exist to do both actions
• *The challenge involves the conflict between short-term and long-term desires
• Self-contro affects long-term and cognitive aspects in consumers

Consumer Involvement Factors

• Perceiving personal relevance is a key factor
• Person factors: Needs, Importance, Interest, & Values
• Product factors: extent to which options are available

Effect of Communication

• It can also affect personal relevance or interest attached to an object of interest
• Source communicates a medium
• Content informs or engages

Situational Factors

• Purchase situations
• Product usuage
• Occasion, and how they interract

Involvement Factors

• Divided by product or personal differences
• Car or people skills affect personal levels of motivation to process

Low vs High Envolvement and Inertia

• Affects consumptions with brands in order of switching to inertia

High End Consumption

• Associated wit brand, absorbed by flow state, and/or fierce devotion

Marketing and Low Involvement

• These consumers often want strategies to increase those qualities and a level of reach

Stimuli and Inert Shoppers

• Coupons, displays, shelf distribution are designed to get inert consumers to want more

Strategies and Stimuli

• These can be designed to appeal to hedonistic needs

Brand Recognition

• These are the results of a strategy to get people to want novel, celebrity, and brand recognition to maintain a bond

Central vs Peripheral

• The attitude change depends the level of involvement

Routes and Persuasion

• Central thinking is motivated. Arguments are often uses
• Peripheral routes are not motivated and more based with color

Influence of Cues and Attitude

• These are often dependent and independent