CONSUMER BAHAVIOR

Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the
activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services, and how
the consumer's emotions, attitudes and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer
behaviour emerged in the 1940s and 50s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has
become an inter-disciplinary social science that blends elements
from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, marketing
and economics (especially behavioural economics).

The study of consumer behaviour formally investigates individual qualities such

as demographics, personality lifestyles, and behavioural variables (such as usage rates, usage
occasion, loyalty, brand advocacy, and willingness to provide referrals), in an attempt to
understand people's wants and consumption. Also investigated are the influences on the
consumer, from groups such as family, friends, sports, and reference groups, to society in
general, including brand-influencers and opinion leaders.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE

Course Description
Consumer behavior or consumer buying behavior are all the aspects that
affect consumers' search, selection, and purchase of products.
An example of a new trend developing in society is children's influence on
their parents' purchases. ... Kids today are major factors in the purchase of
expensive products.

Learning Objectives

 Establish the relevance of consumer behavior theories and concepts to

marketing decisions.
 Implement appropriate combinations of theories and concepts. Recognize
social and ethical implications of marketing actions on consumer behavior.
 Use most appropriate techniques to apply market solutions.
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CHAPTER 1:Understanding Consumer Behavior and Consumer Research

Objectives:

1. Define consumer behavior.

2. Explain why it is important to understand consumer
behavior.
3. Describe how the study of consumer behavior has evolved as a
scientific field of study.

What Is Consumer Behavior?

Not many years ago, when students opened a textbook on consumer behavior, they read
that consumer behavior (usually called buyer behavior) involves the study of how consumers
decide to buy products. While this definition is accurate, it is an inadequate description of the full
scope of activities in which consumers engage prior to purchase and during and after
consumption. Contemporary definitions are much broader and try to capture the full range of
consumer activities. Consumer behavior entails all con-sumer activities associated with the
purchase, use, and disposal of goods and services, including the consumer’s emotional, mental,
and behavioral responses that precede, determine, or follow these activities (see Figure 1.1).

Consumers: Individual versus Organizational

The term “consumer” can describe either individual or organizational consumers.

Individual consumers purchase goods and services to satisfy their own personal needs and
wants or to satisfy the need and wants of others. Purchases for others include satis-fying
household uses, such as filling the family car with gasoline or paying the home’s electric bill; gift
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purchases, such as buying a birthday gift for a brother; or charitable contributions, such as buying
cookies from a Girl Scout or a raffle ticket at a school fundraiser. Individual consumers come in
all ages, life stages, and social backgrounds;

they range from the six-year-old boy begging his mother for green ketchup in the gro-cery aisle
to the 20-something college graduate renting her first apartment to the retired couple in their 70s
browsing in antique shops while on vacation.

Organizational consumers purchase goods and services in order to:

• produce other goods or services

• resell them to other organizations or to individual consumers help
manage and run their organization
Consumer Activities

Consumer behavior is broken down into purchase, use, and disposal

activities. Categorizing consumer behavior by type of activity is useful
because consumers’ re-sponses to stimuli may differ depending on
whether they are purchasing, using, or disposing of a single product or
service. For example, when leading up to purchase, a long line outside a
night club is a positive factor in evaluating that club. Long lines imply that
everyone wants to go there, and that the club is probably very good. But,
after you have purchased your ticket, that long line is no longer a desirable
factor, as you impatiently wait to get in. Furthermore, once you make it to
the door, that long line ahead of you now means that the club is overly
crowded, and therefore, a lot less appealing. So, from this example,
categorizing activities by whether they occur prior to purchase versus
during use shows how consumer responses can change significantly
within a situation. Before we closely examine consumers’ responses, let’s
first consider consumer purchase, use, and disposal activities in more
detail.

Purchase activities are those through which consumers acquire

goods and services. Purchase activities also include everything done
leading up to the purchase, such as gathering and evaluating information
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about the product or service and choosing where to make the purchase.
The purchase method and any additional services desired— home
delivery and installation, and extended warranties, for instance—also
influence purchase activities. So too are factors unique to the situation,
such as the atmosphere of a store, the design of a website, the reason for
the purchase, and the amount of time the consumer devotes to the buying
decision.

Use activities describe where, when, and how consumption takes

place. For example, do consumers immediately consume the product after
purchase, like an ice cream cone or a haircut, or do they delay
consumption, such as when they buy new clothing for a

Consumer Responses Central to our definition of consumer behavior are

consumers’ emotional, mental, and behavioral responses to goods and
their marketing.

Emotional responses (also called affective responses) reflect a

consumer’s emotions, feelings, and moods. For example, when a
consumer buys his first car, both excitement and uncertainty are probably
among his affective responses.

Mental responses (also referred to as cognitive responses) include a

consumer’s thought processes, opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions
about products and services. Weighing the pros and cons of financing a
new car, making a mental list of attributes the car should have, and
imagining oneself driving that car are some of the cognitive processes a
consumer might experience in purchasing a new automobile. Mental
responses can be evaluative, involving making a judgment that assigns
value to something. They can also be non-evaluative, involving thinking
about something without making a value judgment. Cognitive responses
can be very specific and refer to one brand or even one attribute of that
brand; they can also be very broad and deal with entire categories of
products.
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Finally, behavioral responses include a consumer’s overt decisions

and actions during the purchase, use, and disposal activities identified
earlier. To continue the car purchase example, a consumer is likely to pay
close attention to various car advertisements, read sales literature at the
car dealership or on a manufacturer’s website, test drive a car prior to
purchase, discuss the decision with friends or family, and regularly
maintain the car with oil changes after the purchase. Each of these actions
exemplifies behavioral responses.

Why Study Consumer Behavior?

People study consumer behavior for a variety of reasons and in a variety of contexts, such
as a student in a university class, a marketing executive working in an organiza-tion, an
advertising designer working at a large agency, or a professor teaching and doing scholarly
research. Let’s examine a few of the benefits of studying consumer behavior, specifically, to
improve business performance, to influence public policy, and to educate and help consumers
make better decisions.

To Improve Business Performance

Organizations that market products and services often study consumer behavior—or use
the results and recommendations of others’ research—to improve business performance through
customer-focused strategies. Marketers who understand their customers can create better
products and services, promote their products and services more effectively, and develop
marketing plans and strategies that foster sustainable competitive advantag-es. Their goal is to
understand the general dynamics of consumer behavior that remain constant regardless of fads
or trends. This understanding enables marketers to predict what motivates people to buy and
then to deliver products that respond to those motiva-tions, thereby successfully meeting and
exceeding customer expectations over time.

To Influence Public Policy

People working in government agencies or in non-profit organizations often are called to

influence public policy and improve society’s well-being. Public policy is the establishment of laws
and regulations that govern business practice in order to protect consumers.

To Educate and Help Consumers Make Better Decisions

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Many people study consumer behavior because they want to educate consumers or help
them act responsibly. For example, in addition to enacting labeling laws to protect consumers,
the FDA provides detailed advice to consumers on how to interpret dietary information. You can
visit the FDA’s website on food and nutrition to learn more at http://www.fda.gov. How consumers
gather, process and use information, and what motivates them, are important research topics for
those interested in consumer education.

Consumer Behavior as a Field of Study

Consumer behavior is an applied social science that draws on theories and concepts of
psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and statistics. A fairly young science, the study
of consumer behavior emerged in the late 1940s when many firms shifted from a selling
orientation (selling consumers the excess inventory of what they pro-duced) to producing goods
that consumers actually needed and wanted. This change in focus was the beginning of the
marketing concept, the idea that firms should discover and satisfy customer needs and wants
in an efficient and profitable manner, while ben-efiting the long-term interests of society.

The Evolution of Consumer Behavior Research

How researchers study consumer behavior has also evolved over the past several de-cades.
Three prominent approaches are examined here: motivation research, behavioral science, and
Interpretivism.

Motivation Research One of the earliest approaches to studying

consumer behavior, motivation research applied psychoanalytic therapy
concepts from clinical psy-chology to consumer behavior research. The
method was developed by Ernest Dichter, a Freudian psychoanalyst,
shortly after World War II. He used in-depth interviewing techniques to
uncover a person’s hidden or unconscious motivations. 12 In consumer
research, an in-depth interview (IDI) is a lengthy (sometimes several
hours), probing interview, where a carefully trained interviewer extensively
questions a subject about his or her purchase motivations. Depth
interviews are more formally described later in this chapter under specific
research methods.
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A Behavioral Science Perspective Since the 1960s, a behavioral

science perspective (also referred to as Positivism and social science) has
dominated the field of consumer research. Behavioral science applies
the scientific method, rely-ing on systematic, rigorous procedures to
explain, control, and predict consumer be-havior. Thus, behavioral
scientists study people and their behaviors in the same way that natural
scientists study physical phenomena. Because behavioral scientists study
people, however, research findings are more difficult to interpret. The
primary meth-ods of behavioral science include the experimental
approach—conducting controlled experiments—and the marketing
science approach—employing computer-based simula-tions and
mathematical models to explain and predict consumer behavior.

Consumer

Behavior Research

Consumer researchers study consumer responses and activi-ties by using marketing research
methods. Marketing re-search is a systematic process of planning, collecting, analyz-ing, and
interpreting data and information relevant to mar-keting problems and consumer behavior.
Marketing research also enables businesses to better understand the market(s) in which they
compete and the broader environment in order to identify opportunities and threats. Finally,
consumer re-searchers use marketing research to analyze the effectiveness of marketing
strategies, programs, and tactics. Ultimately, effective marketing and consumer research should
provide marketers with relevant information for making decisions, reducing uncertainty, and
improving profits.

Basic versus Applied Research

Consumer research is divided into two broad categories based on the goals of the re-
search: basic research and applied research. Basic research looks for general relation-ships
between variables, regardless of the specific situation. For example, basic research has shown
that using celebrity endorsers in advertising can increase consumers’ positive attitudes toward a
brand, especially when the celebrity is well liked and fits well with the product or the product’s
CONSUMER BAHAVIOR

image. Examples include Tiger Woods endorsing Nike golf equipment and Mariah Carey
endorsing Pepsi Cola.

Correlations and Causal Relationships

Consumer researchers are especially interested in uncovering two special types of

relation-ships—correlations and causal (cause-and-effect). When a statistically testable and sig-
nificant relationship exists between two variables, we say the variables are correlated (see
Figure 1.3). A variable is simply any factor that that can potentially change. For example, if
researchers are studying the relationship between advertising and sales, those would be the
variables of interest. There are three main types of correlations: positive, negative, and zero. In
a positive correlation, the two variables increase or decrease together. A negative correlation
means that as one variable increases, the related variable decreases. For ex-ample, research
has shown that there is a positive correlation between advertising expen-ditures and level of
sales. As advertising increases, sales also increase. On the other hand, a negative correlation
between product malfunctions and customer satisfaction exists—as product malfunctions
increase, customer satisfaction tends to decrease.

Secondary versus Primary Data

Where do marketers collect data? There are two broad sources of data: secondary data
and primary data. Secondary data is data that already exist and is readily accessible. One source
could be internal organizational sources, such a company’s sales history records, customer
database, sales force observations, or even previous company research proj-ects. Secondary
data is also available from outside sources, including U.S. and foreign government agencies that
offer a variety of reports, such as the U.S. Census Population Report and the Vital Statistics
Report; academic and trade publications, such as Moody’s Manuals, Journal of Consumer
Research, and Advertising Age, that often publish the re-sults of both basic and applied research;
and finally, commercial syndicated

data sourc-es, such as Nielsen TV Ratings Reports and InfoScan data from supermarket
scanners. Syndicated data are data that are periodically collected using standardized procedures
and analyzed by a commercial firm, which then makes the results available for purchase. For
example, Nielson Market Research Company monitors people’s television viewing habits.
Research participants are asked to keep journal information on their viewing habits and an
CONSUMER BAHAVIOR

electronic monitor attached to the television records channel selection and viewing time. Table
1.1 lists some examples of secondary data sources.

Primary Data Collection Methods A diverse set of methods en-able researchers to “get inside
the mind of the consumer” through primary data. There is no one perfect primary research
method. Each has strengths and weaknesses, so the best methodology is the one that achieves
the individual researcher’s objectives. Let’s examine four common primary research methods:

1. observation
2. direct questioning
3. experimentation
4. projective techniques
Observation By using observational techniques, researchers can record people’s behavior,
either with or without their knowl-edge. When a person is aware of the observation, the research
is referred to as obtrusive observation. For example, toy manufacturers routinely invite children
in for “playtime.” In a research facility made to resemble a classroom, playground, or family room,
chil-dren are encouraged to play with toys while researchers record all their behaviors and
comments.
Direct Questioning: Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups Direct forms of questioning are
probably the most popular types of con-sumer research methods because researchers can
collect a wide variety of data, such as group versus individual, brief answers versus long answers,
and qualitative versus quan-titative. Researchers can also collect large amounts of data with
direct questioning, and the variety of direct questioning methods adds flexibility to the data
collection task. Questioning the consumer directly can take a number of forms, including written
and oral surveys, which can be administered via mail, telephone, fax, e-mail, the Internet, or face-
to-face.

Experiments Experiments manipulate variables in a controlled setting to determine their

relationship to one another. Researchers use experiments to rule out all but one explanation for
a particular observation. In designing an experiment, researchers first identify any variables that
can possibly change. There are three broad types of variables:

•Independent variables are the factors that are changed or manipulated.

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Dependent variables are factors that change in

re-sponse to researchers’ manipulations of the
indepen-dent variables.

• Constants are factors that researchers do not

allow to change, but instead control.

Projective Techniques Borrowed from psychology, projective techniques are an

“unstructured, indirect form of questioning that encourages respondents to proj-ect their
underlying beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and motivations in an apparently un-related or ambiguous
scenario.” In other words, projective techniques use seemingly meaningless exercises to uncover
consumers’ unconscious points of view. Projective techniques consist of a variety of tests that fall
under four broad categories:

1. Word-association tests, which ask subjects to respond to a list of words with one or more
associated words that come to mind
2. Completion tests, which ask subjects to fill in the blanks by finishing sentences or stories
3. Construction tests, including cartoon construction, which ask subjects fill in the
word/thought “bubbles” in a cartoon; or picture construction, where subjects tell a story
about a picture (see Figure 1.5)
4. Expression tests, including role-play activities and third-person techniques, which ask
subjects to describe the actions of typical others.

For further discussion please refer to the link provided: What Is Consumer Behavior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60eRK7AwgwM
For further discussion please refer to the link provided The importance of studying consumer behavior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1q1nnPCcKw
For further discussion please refer to the link provided To Improve Business Performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TflA6AjYAoA

Reference:
Consumer Behavior By:Frank R. Kardes,Maria L. Cronley and
Thomas W. Cline
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