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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), and
2. Four main psychological processes that affect consumer behavior are motivation,
perception, learning, and memory.
3. To understand how consumers actually make buying decisions, marketers must
4. The typical buying process consists of the following sequence of events: problem
5. Consumers will not necessarily go through the buying process in an orderly
6. The attitudes of others, unanticipated situational factors, and perceived risk may
7. 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.
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?
• What research tools will help you better understand the effect of these factors on
buyer attitudes and behavior?
• What consumer buying roles and buying behaviors are particularly relevant for PDA
products?
• What kind of marketing activities should Sonic plan to coincide with each stage of the
consumer buying process?
ASSIGNMENTS
tudents 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 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?
Consumers often choose and use brands that have a brand personality consistent with their
own actual self-concept, ideal self-concept, or others self-concept. Have the students review
their recent purchases of a car, computer, furniture, or clothing and ask them to comment on,
why they purchased this product, who influenced their purchase, and what does this purchase
say about their own self-concept ideas. What is their definition of the “brand personality” of
this recent purchase—as compared to the definitions stated in the chapter by Stanford’s
Jennifer Aaker?
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
urban areas is seen as taking advantage of a vulnerable market segment. Critics can be
especially harsh in evaluation of marketing programs that target African Americans and other
minority groups, claiming that they often employ clichéd stereotypes and inappropriate
depictions. Others counter with the point of view that targeting and positioning is critical to
marketing and that these marketing programs are an attempt to be relevant to a certain
consumer group.
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, such as video
games or superheroes?
Suggested Answer: Disney is a valuable and powerful brand. Associating the brand with
something that is not successful or does not embody the values people associate with the
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?
Suggested Answer: IKEA achieved this level of success by offering a unique value
Rooster themes, which quickly sold out after the holiday.
When employees realized U.S. shoppers were buying vases as drinking glasses because
they considered IKEA’s regular glasses too small, the company developed larger glasses
for the U.S. market.
2) IKEA has essentially changed the way people shop for furniture. Discuss the pros and
cons of this strategy, especially as the company plans to continue to expand in places like
Asia and India.
DETAILED CHAPTER OUTLINE
Opening vignette: Marketers must have a thorough understanding of how consumers think,
feel, and act and offer clear value to each and every target consumer. Domino’s dealt with
negative consumer attitudes about its pizza by adding an award-winning ads and social media
campaign that informed consumers about its reformulated pizza and by incorporating
innovative ways to interact with/order from the restaurants. This chapter explores individual
consumers’ buying dynamics.
I. What Influences Consumer Behavior?
A. 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
B. A consumer’s buying behavior is influenced by cultural, social, and personal
factors.
i. Of these, cultural factors exert the broadest and deepest influence
ii. Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behavior.
1. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and
geographic regions.
2. When subcultures grow large and affluent enough, companies
often design specialized marketing programs to serve them.
C. Virtually all human societies exhibit social stratification, most often in 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.
i. One classic depiction of social classes in the United States defined seven
D. In addition to cultural factors, social factors such as reference groups, family, and
social roles and statuses affect our buying behavior.
i. A person’s reference groups are all the groups that have a direct (face-to-
face) or indirect influence on their attitudes or behavior.
2. Some of these are primary groups with whom the person interacts
3. People also belong to secondary groups, such as religious,
4. Reference groups influence members in at least three ways.
a. They expose an individual to new behaviors and lifestyles
5. People are also influenced by groups to which they do not belong
6. Where reference group influence is strong, marketers must
determine how to reach and influence the group’s opinion leaders.
a. An opinion leader is the person who offers informal advice
or information about a specific product or product
category, such as which of several brands is best or how a
particular product may be used
identifying the media they read, and directing messages to
them.
ii. Communication researchers propose a social-structure view of
interpersonal communication
1. Society consists of cliques or small groups whose members
interact frequently
2. Clique members are similar, and their closeness facilitates
4. This openness is helped along by people who connect two or more
cliques without belonging to either and by bridges, people who
belong to one clique and are linked to a person in another.
iii. Three factors that help ignite public interest in an idea
1. Three types of people work to ignite public interest in an idea
a. Mavens: people knowledgeable about big and small
2. The second factor is “Stickiness.” An idea must be expressed so
that it motivates people to act.
3. The third factor, “The Power of Context,” controls whether those
spreading an idea are able to organize groups and communities
around it.
iv. Another perspective suggests marketers should cultivate “bees,”
hyperdevoted customers who are not satisfied just knowing about the next
trend but live to spread the word, not alphas, who may be socially isolated
v. Firms score customers online to estimate their buying power
2. Influence measures include Klout Scores
vi. Shill marketing or stealth marketing entails anonymous promotion of a
product or service in public places without disclosing their financial
relationships to the sponsoring firm
E. Family is the most important consumer buying organization in society; family
members constitute the most influential primary reference group
i. Family of orientation consists of parents and sibling; affects consumption
choices
ii. Family of procreation is the person’s spouse and children
iii. Majority of husbands and wives engage in joint decision making for
expensive products and services
iv. Amount of dollars spent by and the direct and indirect influence wielded
by children and teens has increased.
2. Indirect influence means parents know the brands, product
3. By the time children are about 2 years old, they can often
recognize characters, logos, and specific brands.
5. A year or so later, they can understand the concept of persuasive
intent on the part of advertisers.
6. By 9 or 10, they can perceive the discrepancies between message
and product.
F. Roles and status in groups are an important source of information and help to
define norms for behavior.
i. A role consists of the activities a person is expected to perform.
G. 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.
i. Brand personalities attract users that are high in the same traits
ii. Dominant personality traits vary by geographic region
iii. Consumers choose and use brand personalities consistent with their
1. Actual self-concept
iv. Effects may be more pronounced for publicly consumed products than for
privately consumed goods and for high self-monitors
v. Multiple aspects of self (serious professional, caring family member,
active fun-lover) may often be evoked differently in different situations or
around different types of people.
H. Lifestyle and Values: people from the same subculture, social class, and
occupation may adopt quite different lifestyles
i. A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in
activities, interests, and opinions.
I. Consumer decisions are also influenced by core values, the belief systems that
underlie attitudes and behaviors.
i. Core values go much deeper than behavior or attitude and at a basic level
II. Key Psychological Processes
A. The starting point for understanding consumer behavior is the stimulus-response
model
i. Marketing and environmental stimuli enter the consumer’s consciousness,
and a set of psychological processes combine with certain consumer
characteristics to result in decision processes and purchase decisions.
B. Motivation
i. Biogenic needs arise from physiological states of tension such as hunger,
thirst, or discomfort.
ii. Psychogenic needs arise from psychological states of tension such as the
need for recognition, esteem, or belonging.
iii. A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of
intensity to drive us to act.
iv. Motivation has both direction—we select one goal over another—and
intensity—we pursue the goal with more or less vigor.
v. Freud’s Theory: psychological forces shaping people’s behavior are
largely unconscious and that a person cannot fully understand his or her
own motivations.
1. Laddering lets us trace a person’s motivations from the stated
vi. Ernest Dichter pioneered various projective techniques such as word
association, sentence completion, picture interpretation, and role playing
vii. Cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, works on breaking the “code”
viii. Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by particular
needs at particular times.
1. Human needs are arranged in a hierarchy from most to least
2. People will try to satisfy their most important need first and then
move to the next.
ix. Frederick Herzberg developed a two-factor theory that distinguishes
dissatisfiers (factors that cause dissatisfaction) from satisfiers (factors that
cause satisfaction)
1. The absence of dissatisfiers is not enough to motivate a purchase;
satisfiers must be present.
2. The presence of a product warranty does not act as a satisfier or
4. Sellers should identify the major satisfiers or motivators of
purchase in the market and then supply them.
C. Perception
i. In marketing, perceptions are more important than reality because they
affect consumers’ actual behavior.
ii. Perception is the process by which we select, organize, and interpret
information inputs to create a meaningful picture of the world.
iii. Sensory Marketing: marketing that engages the consumers’ senses and
affects their perception, judgment and behavior
1. Sensory marketing can be used subconsciously to shape consumer
2. Sensory marketing can also be used to affect the perceptions of
3. Touch is the first sense to develop and the last sense we lose with
age.
a. High need-for-touch (NFT) individuals were more
confident and less frustrated about their product
4. Smell: Scent-encoded information has been shown to be more
5. Sound (audition): Sounds that make up a word can carry meanings
6. Taste. Humans can distinguish only five pure tastes: sweet, salty,
sour, bitter, and umami.
a. Taste perceptions themselves depend on all the other
7. Vision: many visual perception biases or illusions exist in day-to-
day consumer behavior.
iv. People emerge with different perceptions of the same object because of
three perceptual processes:
1. Selective attention: because we cannot possibly attend to all these,
we screen most stimuli out
2. Selective distortion: the tendency to interpret information in a way
that fits our preconceptions/prior beliefs and expectations
v. Subliminal Perception: no evidence supports the notion that marketers can
systematically control consumers at a subliminal level
D. Learning
i. Learning induces changes in our behavior arising from experience.
ii. Learning theorists believe learning is produced through the interplay of
drives, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement.
2. Cues are minor stimuli that determine when, where, and how a
person responds.
4. Discrimination means we have learned to recognize differences in
sets of similar stimuli and can adjust our responses accordingly.
iii. Learning theory teaches marketers that they can build demand for a
product by associating it with strong drives, using motivating cues, and
providing positive reinforcement.
iv. The hedonic bias occurs when people have a general tendency to attribute
success to themselves and failure to external causes.
E. Emotions
i. Consumer response may be emotional and invoke different kinds of
iii. An emotion-filled brand story has been shown to trigger’s people desire to
pass along things they hear about brands, through either word of mouth or
online sharing.
F. Memory
i. Cognitive psychologists distinguish between short-term memory (STM)—
a temporary and limited repository of information—and ong-term memory
(LTM)—a more permanent, essentially unlimited repository.
ii. Most widely accepted views of long-term memory structure assume we
form some kind of associative model.
1. The associative network memory model views LTM as a set of
nodes and links.
3. Any type of information can be stored in the memory network,
including verbal, visual, abstract, and contextual.
4. A spreading activation process from node to node determines how
5. Consumer brand knowledge is a node in memory with a variety of
linked associations.
a. The strength and organization of these associations will be
important determinants of the information we can recall
iii. Memory Processes
2. The more attention we pay to the meaning of information during
encoding, the stronger the resulting associations in memory will
be.
4. The presence of other product information in memory can produce
5. The time between exposure to information and encoding has been
shown generally to produce only gradual decay.
6. Information may be available in memory but not be accessible for
recall without the proper retrieval cues or reminders.
III. The Buying Decision Process: The Five-Stage Model
A. Consumer behavior questions marketers should ask:
i. Who buys our product or service?
ii. Who makes the decision to buy the product or service?
iii. Who influences the decision to buy the product or service?
iv. How is the purchase decision made? Who assumes what role?
v. What does the customer buy? What needs must be satisfied? What wants
are fulfilled?
vi. Why do customers buy a particular brand? What benefits do they seek?
vii. Where do they go or look to buy the product or service? Online and/or
offline?
viii. When do they buy? Any seasonality factors? Any time of
day/week/month?
ix. How is our product or service perceived by customers?
x. What are customers’ attitudes toward our product or service?
xi. What social factors might influence the purchase decision?
xii. Do customers’ lifestyles influence their decisions?
xiii. How do personal, demographic, or economic factors influence the
purchase decision?
B. The buying decision process includes all the experiences in learning, choosing,
using, and even disposing of a product.
C. The consumer typically passes through five stages: problem recognition,
information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase
behavior.
D. Consumers don’t always pass through all five stages—they may skip or reverse
some.
E. Problem Recognition
i. With an internal stimulus, one of the person’s normal needs—hunger,
F. Information Search
i. A mild search state is called heightened attention (the consumer becomes
more receptive to information about a product).
ii. Active information search includes: looking for reading material, phoning
friends, going online, and visiting stores to learn about the product.
iii. Major information sources to which consumers will turn fall into four
groups:
2. Commercial: Advertising, Web sites, e-mails, salespersons,
dealers, packaging, displays
4. Experiential: Handling, examining, using the product
iv. The greatest quantity of information is received from commercial sources
1. This process of identifying where consumers fall in the decision-
making hierarchy is called market partitioning.
2. Attributes can also be used to segment customers.
G. Evaluation of Alternatives
i. The consumer is trying to satisfy a need.
ii. The consumer is looking for certain benefits from the product solution.
iv. Consumers will pay the most attention to attributes that deliver the sought-
after benefits.
v. Through experience and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes that
influence buying behavior.
2. Attitude is a person’s enduring favorable or unfavorable
3. Attitudes economize on energy and thought so they can be very
difficult to change.
vi. Expectancy-Value Model: consumers evaluate products and services by
combining their brand beliefs—the positives and negatives—according to
importance.
vii. Strategies to improve attitudes under the Expectancy-Value Model:
1. Redesign/real repositioning
3. Alter beliefs about competitors’ brands/competitive depositioning
5. Call attention to neglected attributes
6. Shift the buyer’s ideals
H. Purchase Decision
i. A consumer may make as many as five subdecisions: brand (brand A),
dealer (dealer 2), quantity (one computer), timing (weekend), and payment
method (credit card)
ii. Noncompensatory Models of Consumer Choice
1. The expectancy-value model is a compensatory model, in that
3. With noncompensatory models of consumer choice, positive and
negative attribute considerations don’t necessarily net out.
a. Conjunctive heuristic: the consumer sets a minimum
acceptable cutoff level for each attribute and chooses the
b. Lexicographic heuristic: the consumer chooses the best
brand on the basis of its perceived most important
4. Consumers don’t necessarily use only one type of choice rule.
iii. Intervening Factors: Attitudes of others can intervene in the purchase
process if the other person’s negative attitude toward our preferred
alternative is intense and our motivation to comply with the other person’s
wishes is high
iv. A consumer’s decision to modify, postpone, or avoid a purchase decision
is heavily influenced by one or more types of perceived risk
1. Functional risk—The product does not perform to expectations
3. Financial risk—The product is not worth the price paid
5. Psychological risk—The product affects the mental well-being of
the user
6. Time risk—The failure of the product results in an opportunity
cost of finding another satisfactory product
I. Postpurchase Behavior
i. Postpurchase Satisfaction is a function of the closeness between
expectations and the product’s perceived performance
1. Some consumers magnify the gap when the product isn’t perfect
3. Dissatisfied consumers may abandon or return the product. They
may seek information that confirms its high value.
4. They may take public action by complaining to the company,
5. Private actions include deciding to stop buying the product (exit
option) or warning friends (voice option)
1. The central route: attitude formation or change stimulates much
2. The peripheral route: attitude formation or change provokes much
4. We buy many products under conditions of low involvement and
without significant brand differences
5. Evidence suggests we have low involvement with most low-cost,
frequently purchased products
ii. Four techniques to try to convert a low-involvement product into one of
higher involvement.
2. They can link the product to a personal situation
4. They might add an important feature
iii. Variety-Seeking Buying Behavior: bbuying situations that are
characterized by low involvement but significant brand differences may
trigger a lot of brand switching.
1. The market leader will try to encourage habitual buying behavior
2. Challenger firms will encourage variety seeking by offering lower
prices, deals, coupons, free samples, and advertising that tries to
break the consumer’s purchase and consumption cycle and
presents reasons for trying something new.
IV. Behavioral Decision Theory and Behavioral Economics
A. Behavioral decision theorists have identified many situations in which consumers
make seemingly irrational choices
i. Consumers are more likely to choose an alternative (a home bread maker)
after a relatively inferior option (a slightly better but significantly more
expensive home bread maker) is added to the available choice set
ii. Consumers are more likely to choose an alternative that appears to be a
compromise in the particular choice set under consideration, even if it is
not the best alternative on any one dimension
ix. Consumers who make purchases for later consumption appear to make
x. Consumer’s predictions of their future tastes are not accurate—they do not
really know how they will feel after consuming the same flavor of yogurt
or ice cream several times
xi. Consumers often overestimate the duration of their overall emotional
way
xv. Consumers are less likely to choose products selected by others for
reasons they find irrelevant, even when these other reasons do not suggest
anything positive or negative about the product’s values
xvi. Consumers’ interpretations and evaluations of past experiences are greatly
influenced by the ending and trend of events. A positive event at the end of
a service experience can color later reflections and evaluations of the
experience as a whole.
xvii. When faced with a simple but important decision, consumers can actually
make things more complicated than they should.
B. Decision Heuristics
i. The availability heuristic—Consumers base their predictions on the
quickness and ease with which a particular example of an outcome comes
to mind.
C. Framing is the manner in which choices are presented to and seen by a decision
maker.
D. Mental Accounting describes the way consumers code, categorize, and evaluate
financial outcomes of choices
i. Consumers tend to segregate gains.
E. The principles of mental accounting are derived in part from prospect theory,
which maintains that consumers frame their decision alternatives in terms of gains
and losses according to a value function.
