LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this chapter, we will address the following questions:
1. How do consumer characteristics influence buying behavior?
2. What major psychological processes influence consumer responses to the
marketing program?
3. How do consumers make purchasing decisions?
4. In what ways do consumers stray from a deliberative, rational decision process?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
1. Consumer behavior is influenced by three factors: cultural (culture, subculture,
and social class), social (reference groups, family, and social roles and statuses),
2. Four main psychological processes affecting consumer behavior are motivation,
3. To understand how consumers actually make buying decisions, marketers must
4. The typical buying process consists of the following sequence of events: problem
recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision,
5. Consumers are constructive decision makers and subject to many contextual
influences. They often exhibit low involvement in their decisions, using many
heuristics as a result.
OPENING THOUGHT
C H A P T E R
6
ANALYZING CONSUMER
MARKETS
This chapter perhaps might be the most difficult of all for some to grasp as it delves into
psychological theories surrounding our understanding of our own minds. It can be, however,
an interesting one for class discussions as it opens up and fosters student participation (as
consumers). This is a good chapter for such discussions on how students buy, what they buy,
how they buy, and so forth.
The second challenge found in this chapter is that of the consumer buying process. It has been
shown to be helpful to have the students talk about their buying processes for goods or
services that are of interest to them and to then outline these processes on the blackboard.
Having the students “talk through” how they buy and then relating these actions to the steps in
TEACHING STRATEGY AND CLASS ORGANIZATION
PROJECTS
1. At this point in the semester-long marketing project, students should present their
2. A consumer products company “knows” its consumers—it has to in order to be
competitive and to market successfully. During the course of the semester, students should
3. Sonic PDA Marketing Plan: Every company has to study customer markets and behavior
prior to developing a marketing plan. Marketers need to understand who constitutes the
market, what and why they buy, who participates in and influences the buying process,
and how, when, and where they buy.
• What cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors have the most influence on
consumers buying PDAs?
ASSIGNMENTS
The Marketing Insight entitled, Marketing to Cultural Market Segments includes examples of
how companies are capitalizing on these markets. Students should be assigned to survey their
local business environment (city, town, campus area) and collect examples of how local area
businesses are trying to capture these cultural market segments. For example, the students
should collect information regarding the number of cultural restaurants in the area and then
compare these numbers to the total amount of eating establishments and the percentage of the
population that is of that ethnicity. How do the numbers compare, contrast, and what
marketing strategies do they hint at?
Figure 6.1 defines the model of consumer behavior. In an examination of each of these
segments, ask the students to rank the importance of each of these characteristics in their
purchase behavior. For example, under the box entitled, Marketing Stimuli, some students will
rank price ahead of products and services as their primary stimulus.
END–OF–CHAPTER SUPPORT
MARKETING DEBATE—Is Target Marketing Ever Bad?
As marketers increasingly develop marketing programs tailored to certain target market
segments, some critics have denounced these efforts as exploitative. For example, the
preponderance of billboards advertising cigarettes, alcohol, and other voices in low-income
Take a position: Targeting minorities is exploitative versus targeting minorities is a sound
business practice.
Suggested Responses:
Pro: When marketers use their advance knowledge of specific target markets, such as
minorities that preys upon the target market’s weaknesses and lack of information, then
marketing can be said to be exploiting the said target market for gains. Marketers should
always be aware that information is a powerful tool that has to be used responsibly and
MARKETING DISCUSSION—What Are Your Mental Accounts?
What mental accounts do you have in your mind about purchasing products and services? Do
you have any rules you employ in spending money? Are they different from what other people
do? Do you follow Thaler’s four principles in reacting to gains and losses?
Suggested Response:
Each student’s answer will differ in these areas. It is important however, to get the students to
Marketing Excellence: DISNEY
1) What does Disney do best to connect with its core consumers?
Suggested Answer: Disney’s greatest challenge today is to keep a 90-year-old brand relevant
and current to its core audience while staying true to its heritage and core brand values.
2) What are the risks and benefits of expanding the Disney brand in new ways?
Suggested Answer: As Disney’s CEO has been quoted as saying: “As a brand that people seek
out and trust, it opens doors to new platforms and markets, and hence to new consumers.
Marketing Excellence: IKEA
1) What are some of the things IKEA is doing right to reach consumers in different markets?
What else could it be doing?
costs down and taxes low. In China, it stocked 250,000 plastic placemats with Year of the
Rooster themes, which quickly sold out after the holiday.
2) IKEA has essentially changed the way people shop for furniture. Discuss the pros and
cons of this strategy.
DETAILED CHAPTER OUTLINE
The aim of marketing is to meet and satisfy target customers’ needs and wants better than
competitors. Marketers must have a thorough understanding of how consumers think,
feel, and act and offer clear value to each and every target consumer.
WHAT INFLUENCES CONSUMER BEHAVIOR?
Consumer behavior is the study of how individuals, groups, and organizations, select, buy,
use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and wants.
Marketers must fully understand both the theory and reality of consumer behavior.
Cultural Factors
Culture, subculture, and social class are particularly important influences on consumer buying
behavior.
C) Most often, it takes the form of social classes, relatively homogeneous and enduring
divisions in a society, hierarchically ordered and with members who share similar
values, interests, and behavior.
D) One class depiction of social classes in the United States defined seven ascending
levels:
1) Lower lowers
2) Upper lowers
E) Social classes members show distinct product and brand preferences in many areas,
including clothing, home furnishings, leisure activities, and automobiles.
Social Factors
In addition to cultural factors, social factors such as reference groups, family, and social
roles and statuses affect our buying behavior.
A) A person’s reference groups are all the groups that have a direct (face–to–face) or
indirect influence on their attitudes or behavior.
1) Groups having a direct influence are called membership groups.
a. Some membership groups are primary groups such as family, friends,
2) Reference groups expose an individual to new behaviors and lifestyles,
influencing attitudes and self–concept.
3) They create pressures for conformity that may affect actual product and brand
choices.
4) People are also influenced by groups to which they do not belong:
a. Aspiration groups are those a person hopes to join.
b. Dissociative groups are those whose values or behavior an individual rejects.
Family
The family is the most important consumer-buying organization in society, and family
members constitute the most influential primary reference group.
A) There are two families in the buyer’s life.
1) The family of orientation consists of parents and siblings.
2) A more direct influence on everyday buying behavior is the family of procreation
—namely, the person’s spouse and children.
Roles and Status
A) We each participate in many groups. We can define a person’s position in each group
in terms of role and status.
Personal Factors
Personal characteristics that influence a buyer’s decision include age and stage in the life
cycle; occupation and economic circumstances; personality and self–concept; and lifestyle and
values.
Marketing Memo: The Average U.S. Consumer Quiz
List a series of statements used in attitudinal surveys of U.S. consumers.
Age and Stage in the Life Cycle
A) Our taste in food, clothes, furniture, and recreation is often related to our age.
Occupation and Economic Circumstances
Occupation influences consumption patterns and economic circumstances influence product.
Product choice is greatly affected by economic circumstances including:
A) Spendable income (level, stability, and time pattern)
Personality and Self-Concept
Each person has personality characteristics that influence his or her buying behavior.
Personality: A set of distinguishing human psychological traits that lead to relatively
consistent and enduring responses to environmental stimuli.
A) Brands also have personalities, and consumers are likely to choose brands whose
personalities match their own.
D) Although in some cases, the match may instead be based on the consumer’s ideal self-
concept (how we would like to view ourselves).
E) Others self-concept (how we think others see us).
Lifestyles and Value
People from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may lead quite different
lifestyles.
A) A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in activities,
interests, and opinions. It portrays the “whole person” interacting with his or her
environment.
KEY PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES
The starting point for understanding consumer behavior is the stimulus-response model.
A) The marketer’s task is to understand what happens in the consumer’s consciousness
between the arrival of the outside marketing stimuli and the ultimate purchase
decisions.
Motivation: Freud, Maslow, Herzberg
We all have many needs at any given time.
Some needs are:
A) Biogenic (arise from physiological states of tension such as hunger).
us to act.
Freud’s Theory
Sigmund Freud assumed that the psychological forces shaping people’s behavior are
largely unconscious, and that a person cannot fully understand his or her own
motivations.
A) A technique called laddering lets us trace a person’s motivations from the stated
instrumental ones to the more terminal ones.
Maslow’s Theory
Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by particular needs at particular
times.
A) Maslow’s answer is that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy from most to least
pressing
5) Self-actualization needs
Herzberg’s Theory
Frederick Herzberg developed a two-factor theory that distinguishes dissatisfiers (factors that
cause dissatisfaction) from satisfiers (factors that cause satisfaction). The absence of
dissatisfiers is not enough to motivate a purchase; satisfiers must be present.
Perception
A motivated person is ready to act—how is influenced by his or her perception of the
situation.
Selective Attention
Attention is the allocation of processing capacity to some stimulus.
It’s estimated that the average person may be exposed to over 1,500 ads or brand
communications a day. Because we cannot possibly attend to all these, we screen most stimuli
out—a process called selective attention.
A) Selective attention means that marketers have to work hard to attract consumers’
notice.
Selective Distortion
Selective distortion is the tendency to interpret information in a way that fits our
preconceptions. Consumers will often distort information to be consistent with prior brand and
Selective Retention
Most of us don’t remember much of the information to which we’re exposed, but we do retain
information that supports our attitudes and beliefs.
Subliminal Perception
The selective perception mechanisms require consumers’ active engagement and thought.
A) The topic of subliminal perception, the argument that marketers embed covert,
Learning
Learning induces changes in our behavior arising from experience.
A) A drive is a strong internal stimulus impelling action.
Emotions
Consumer response is not all cognitive and rational; much may be emotional and invoke
different kinds of feelings.
Memory
Cognitive psychologists distinguish between short-term memory (STM)—a temporary
repository of information, and
A) Long-term memory (LTM)—a more permanent repository
Memory Processes
Memory is a very constructive process, because we don’t remember information and events
completely and accurately. Often we remember bits and pieces and fill in the rest.
A) Memory encoding describes how and where information gets into memory.
Three facts are important about memory retrieval:
1. The presence of other product information in memory can produce interference
effects.
THE BUYING DECISION PROCESS: THE FIVE-STAGE MODEL
The basic psychological processes we’ve reviewed play an important role in consumers’
actual buying decisions.
The consumer passes through five stages:
1. Problem recognition
Problem Recognition
A) The buying process starts when the buyer recognizes a problem or need.
Information Search
Surprisingly, consumers often search for limited amounts of information.
A) An aroused consumer will be inclined to search for more information. We can
distinguish between two types of arousal.
Information Sources
1) Personal (family, friends)
2) Commercial (advertising, Web sites, salespeople)
4) Experiential (handling, examining, using the product)
Search Dynamics
By gathering information, the consumer learns about competing brands and their features.
A) Marketers need to identify the hierarchy of attributes that guide consumer decision
making in order to understand different competitive forces and how these various sets
get formed.
E) Type/price/brand-dominant consumers make up one segment; quality/service/type
buyers make up another. Each may have distinct demographics, psychographics,
and mediagraphics and different awareness, consideration, and choice sets.
evaluate their relative importance.
Evaluation of Alternatives
No single process is used by all consumers, or by one consumer in all buying situations.
The most current models see the consumer forming judgments largely on a conscious and
rational basis.
A) First, the consumer is trying to satisfy a need.
Beliefs and Attitudes
Through experience and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes. These in turn influence
buying behavior.
A) Belief —a descriptive thought that a person holds about something.
B) Attitude—a person’s enduring favorable or unfavorable evaluation, emotional feeling,
and action tendencies toward some object or idea.
Expectancy-Value Model
The consumer arrives at attitudes toward various brands through an attribute evaluation
procedure, developing a set of beliefs about where each brand stands on each attribute.
Purchase Decision
In the evaluation stage, the consumer forms preferences among the brands in the choice set
and may also form an intention to buy the most preferred brand.
In executing a purchase intention, the consumer may make up to five sub-decisions:
A) Brand (brand A)
Non-Compensatory Models of Consumer Choice
The expectancy-value model is a compensatory model, in that perceived good things
about a product can help to overcome perceived bad things. But consumers often take
“mental shortcuts” called heuristics or rules of thumb in the decision process.
With noncompensatory models of consumer choice, positive and negative attribute
considerations do not necessarily net out.
A) With conjunctive heuristic method, the consumer sets a minimum acceptable cutoff
level for each attribute and chooses the first alternative that meets this minimum.
Intervening Factors
Even if consumers form brand evaluations, two general factors can intervene between the
purchase intention and the purchase decision.
A) The first factor is the attitudes of others.
1) The intensity of the other person’s negative attitude toward the consumer’s
preferred alternative.
C) A consumer’s decision to modify, postpone, or avoid a purchase decision is heavily
influenced by perceived risk. There are many types of risks that consumers may
perceive in buying and consuming a product:
1) Functional risk
2) Physical risk
D) Marketers must understand the factors that provoke a feeling of risk in consumers and
provide information and support to reduce it.
Post-Purchase Behavior
After the purchase, the consumer might experience dissonance about their purchase and be
alert to information that supports their decision. Marketing communications should supply
Post-Purchase Satisfaction
Satisfaction is a function of the closeness between expectations and the product’s perceived
performance.
A) If the performance falls short of expectations the consumer is disappointed.
Post-Purchase Actions
Satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product will influence subsequent behavior. A
dissatisfied consumer may abandon or return the product.
Post-Purchase Use and Disposal
Marketers should also monitor how buyers use and dispose of the product. A key driver of
sales frequency is product consumption rate.
Moderating Effects on Consumer Decision-Making
The manner or path by which a consumer moves through the decision-making stages
Low-Involvement Consumer Decision-Making
The expectancy-value model assumes a high level of consumer involvement, or engagement
and active processing the consumer undertakes in responding to a marketing stimulus.
Elaboration Likelihood Model
A) Describes how consumers make evaluations in both low and high involvement
circumstances.
Marketers use four techniques to try to convert a low-involvement product into one of higher
involvement.
A) They can link the product to some involving issue.
Variety–Seeking Buying Behavior
Some buying situations are characterized by low involvement but significant brand
differences. Brand switching occurs for the sake of variety rather than dissatisfaction.
A) Availability heuristics
BEHAVIORAL DECISION THEORY AND BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
As you might guess from low-involvement decision making and variety-seeking, consumers
don’t always process information or make decisions in a deliberate, rational manner.
Decision Heuristics
Above we reviewed some common heuristics that occur with noncompensatory decision-
making. Other heuristics similarly come into play in everyday decision making when
consumers forecast the likelihood of future outcomes or events.
1
A) The availability heuristic – Consumers base their predictions on the quickness and
ease with which a particular example of an outcome comes to mind.
Framing
Decision framing is the manner in which choices are presented to and seen by a decision–
maker.
Mental Accounting
Researchers have found that consumers use mental accounting when they handle their
money.
According to Chicago’s Thaler, mental accounting is based on a set of core principles:
1. Consumers tend to segregate gains. When a seller has a product with more than one
2. Consumers tend to integrate losses. Marketers have a distinct advantage in selling
3. Consumers tend to integrate smaller losses with larger gains. The “cancellation”
4. Consumers tend to segregate small gains from large losses. The “silver lining”
principle might explain the popularity of rebates on big-ticket purchases such as cars.
The principles of mental accounting are derived in part from prospect theory.
Prospect theory maintains that consumers frame their decision alternatives in terms of
gains and losses according to a value function. Consumers are generally loss-averse.
They tend to overweight very low probabilities and underweight very high probabilities.