The aim of marketing is to meet and satisfy customers’ needs and wants. The field of consumer behaviour studies how individuals, groups, and organizations select, buy, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and desires.
Understanding consumer behaviour and “knowing customers” are never simple. Customers may say one thing but do another. They may not be in touch with their deeper motivations. They may respond to influences that change their mind at the last minute.
Small companies stand to profit from understanding how and why their customers buy. In this article, we will consider their willingness to buy as determined by information sources, social environment, psychological forces and situational factors.
DECISION-MAKING AS PROBLEM-SOLVING
To deal with the marketing environment and make purchases, consumers engage in a decision process. One way to look at that process is to view it as problem-solving. When faced with a problem that can be resolved through a purchase (“I’ m bored. How do I satisfy my need for entertainment”), the consumer goes through a series of logical stages to arrive at a decision.
The six stages of the buying-decision process are:
1. Need recognition: The consumer is moved by a need.
2. Choice of an involvement level: The consumer decides how much time and effort to invest in an attempt to satisfy the need.
3. Identification of alternatives: The consumer identifies alternative products and brands and collects information about them.
4. Evaluation of alternatives: The consumer weighs the pros and cons of the alternative identified.
5. Decision: The consumer decides to buy or not to buy and makes other decisions related to the purchase
6. Post-purchase behaviour: The consumer seeks reassurance that the choice made was the correct one.
Purchase decision may not involve all the stages:
l.The consumer can withdraw at any stage prior to the actual purchase. If, for example, the need diminishes or no satisfactory alternatives are available, the process will come to an abrupt end.
2. It is not uncommon for some stages to be skipped. All six stages are likely to be used only in certain buying situations, for instance, when buying high-priced, infrequently purchased items.
3. The stages are not necessarily of the same length. When a mechanic tells you that your car’s engine needs an overhaul, it may take only a moment to recognize the need for a new car. However, the identification and evaluation of alternative models may go on for weeks.
4. Some stages may be performed consciously in certain purchase situations and subconsciously in others. For example, we don’t consciously calculate for every purchase the amount of time and effort we will put forth.
In the following discussion, assume that the six-stage process generally characterizes buying decisions: However, keep in mind that the stage may have to be adjusted to fit the circumstance of a particular purchase situation.
RECOGNITION OF AN UNSATISFIED NEED
The process of deciding what to buy begins when a need that can be satisfied through consumption become strong enough to motivate a person. This need recognition may arise internally (for example when you feel hungry). Or the need may be dormant until it is aroused by an external stimulus, such as an ad or the sight of a product or the depletion of an existing product (your pen runs out of ink)
CHOICE OF AN INVOLVEMENT LEVEL
After recognizing a need, the consumer consciously or unconsciously decides how much effort to exert in satisfying it. Sometimes when a need arise a consumer is dissatisfied with the quality of information about the purchase situation and decides to actively collect and evaluate more. These are high-involvement purchases that entail all six stages of the buying decision process. If, on the other hand, a consumer is comfortable with the information and alternatives readily available, the purchase situation is low involvement. In such cases, the buyer will likely skip directly from need recognition to a decision, ignoring the stages in between.
Some differences in consumer behaviour in high and involvement situations are:
Involvement trends to be greater under any of the fol owing conditions:
- The consumer lacks information about alternatives for satisfying the need.
- A large amount of money is involved.
- The product has considerable social importance.
- The product is seen as having a potential for providing significant benefits.
Since they rarely any of these conditions, most buying decisions for relatively low priced products that have close substitutes would be low involvement. Typical examples are the majority of items sold in supermarkets, variety stores and hardware store. Involvement must be viewed from the perspective of the consumer, not the product. Impulse buying or purchasing with little or no advance planning is a form of low involvement decision-making.
IDENTIFICATION OF ALTERNATIVES
Once a need has been recognized and the level of involvement is selected, the consumer must next identify the alternatives capable of satisfying the need. The search for alternatives is influenced by:
(i) How much information the consumer already has from past experiences and other sources.
(ii ) The consumer’s confidence in that information.
(iii) The expected value of additional information.
EVALUATION OF ALTERNATIVES
Once all the reasonable alternative have been identified, the consumer must evaluate them before making a decision. The evaluation involves establishing some criteria against which each alternative is compared.
The criteria that consumers use in the evaluation result from their past experience and feeling toward various brands, as well as the opinions of family members and friends.
PURCHASE AND RELATED DECISIONS
After searching and evaluating, the consumer must decide whether to buy. Thus the first outcome is the decision to purchase or not to purchase the alternative evaluated as most desirable. If the decision is to buy, a series of related decisions must be made regarding features, where and when to make the actual transaction, how to take delivery or possession, the method of payment and other issues.
POST-PURCHASE BEHAVIOR
What a consumer learns from going through the buying process has an influence on how he or she will behave the next time the same need arises.
Having gathered information evaluated alternatives, and arrived at a decision, the consumer has acquired additional knowledge about the product and various brands. Furthermore, new opinions and beliefs have been formed and old ones have been revised.
Something else often occurs following a purchase. Have you ever gone through a careful decision process for a major purchase (say, a set of tyres for your car or an expensive item of clothing), selected what you thought as the best alternative, but then had doubts about your choice after the purchase? What you were experiencing is post-purchase cognitive dissonance- a state of anxiety brought on by the difficulty of choosing from among several alternatives.
Dissonance typically increases
(1) the higher the value of the purchase
(2) the greater the similarity between the item selected item(s) rejected: and
(3) the greater the importance of the purchase decision. Thus buying a house creates more dissonance than buying a fan.
With this background on the buying, decision process, we can examine what influences buying behaviour.
INFORMATION AND PURCHASE DECISIONS
The consumer must find out what products and brands are available. Without this market information, there wouldn’t be a decision process because there wouldn’t be decisions to make.
What are the sources and types of information that exist in the buying environment? The commercial environment and the social environment are the two sources. The commercial information environment consists of all marketing manufacturers, retailers, advertisers, and salespeople whenever any of them are engaged in efforts to inform or persuade. The social environment is comprised of family, friends, and acquaintances who directly provide information about products.
Advertising is the most familiar type of commercial information. The normal kind of social information is word-of-mouth communication, two or more people discussing a product. To understand how the consumer functions, we will begin by examining the social and group forces that influence the individual’s psychological makeup and also play a role in specific buying decisions
