One or more motives within a person activate goal-oriented behaviour. One such behaviour is perception, that is, the collection and processing of information. Other important psychological activities that play a role in buying decisions are learning, attitude formation, personality and self-concept.
MOTIVATION — THE STARTING POINT
To understand why consumers behave as they do we must first ask why a person acts at all. The answer is, “Because he or she experiences a need. “All behaviour starts with a need. Security, social acceptance and prestige are examples of needs. A need must be aroused or stimulated before it becomes a motive.
Thus, a motive is a need sufficiently stimulated to move an individual to seek satisfaction. At one level buyers are quite willing to talk about their motives for buying common everyday products. At a second level, they are aware of their reasons for buying but will not admit them to others. Third level, where even the buyers cannot explain the factors motivating their buying actions. Purchase is often the result of multiple motives.
Classification Of Motives.
Motives can be grouped into two broad categories:
Needs aroused from physiological state of tension (such as the need for sleep)
Needs aroused from psychological state of tension (such as the needs for affection and self-respect).
PERCEPTION
A motive is an aroused need, it in turn, activates behavior intended to satisfy the aroused need. The process of receiving, organizing and assigning meaning to information or stimuli steered by our five senses is known as perception.
Perception plays a major role in the stage of the buying, decision process where alternatives are identified.
What we perceive- the meaning we give something sensed, depends on the object and our experience. In an instant the mind is capable of receiving information, comparing it to a huge store of images in memory and providing an interpretation. Perception occurs quickly and often with very little information but it is a powerful factor in decision making. Scents for example, are powerful behavior triggers.
Every day we come in contact with an enormous number of marketing stimuli.
However the perceptual process is selective in very specific ways. Consider that:
We pay attention by exception. That is of all marketing stimuli our senses are exposed to, only those with the power to capture and hold our attention have the potential of being perceived. This phenomenon is called selective attention.
As part of perception, new information is compared with a person’s existing store of knowledge, or frame of reference. If an inconsistency is discovered the new information will be distorted to conform to the established beliefs.
We retain only part of what we have selectively perceived.
LEARNING
Learning is changes in behavior resulting from observation and experience. According to stimulus response theory, learning occurs as a person (1) responds to some stimulus by behaving in a particular way and (2) is rewarded for a correct response or penalized for an incorrect one. When same correct response is repeated in reaction to the same stimulus a behavior pattern or learning is established.
Five factors are fundamental to learning
- Drive: Internal or external forces that require person to respond in some way.
- Cues: Signals from the environment that determine the pattern of Response
- .Responses: Behavioral reactions to the drive and cues
- Reinforcement: Results when the response is rewarding. Reinforcement can be either positive or negative. Positive reinforcement involves experiencing a desirable outcome as a result of engaging in the behavior. Negative reinforcement occurs when a behavior allows a person to avoid an undesirable outcome.
- Punishment: A penalty inflicted for incorrect behavior.
PERSONALITY
The study of human personality has given rise to many, widely divergent, schools of psychological thought. In this discussion, personality is defined broadly as an individual’s pattern of traits that influence behavioral response. We speak of people as being self-confident, aggressive, shy, domineering, flexible, and / or friendly and as being influenced (but not control ed) by these that personality traits do influence in their responses to situations..
The Self-Concept. Your self- concept or self-imageis the way you see yourself. At the same it is the picture you think other have of you. Studies of purchases show that general y prefer brands and products that are compatible with their self-concept.
ATTITUDES
An attitude is a learned predisposition to respond to an object or class of objects in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way. Numerous studies have reported a relationship between consumers’ attitudes and their buying behaviour regarding both products selected and brands chosen. Surely, then it is in a marketer’s best interest to understand how attitudes are formed, the functions they perform and how they can be changed.
Al attitudes have the fol owing characteristics in common
( i )Attitudes are learned
(ii)Attitudes have an object. By definition we can hold attitude only toward something
(ii)attitudes have direction and intensity: Our attitudes are either favourable or unfavourable toward the object. They cannot be neutral. This factor is important
for marketers since both strongly held favourable and strongly held unfavourable attitudes are difficult to change.
(iv) Final y attitudes tend to be stable and generalizable. Once formed, attitudes usual y endure and the longer they are held, the more resistance to change they become. It can be extremely difficult to change strongly held attitudes. Consequently when the marketer is faced with negative or unfavourable attitudes, there are two options:
Try to change the attitude to be compatible with the product
Determine what the consumers; attitudes are and then change the product to match those attitudes.
