IRJMSH Vol 5 Issue 12 [Year 2014] ISSN 2277 9809 (0nline) 23489359 (Print)

CONSUMER BUYING BEHAVIOUR

AUTHOR: ANKIT SINGH

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

CO AUTHOR: NEETU DHAYAL

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR- ADHOC
SHRI RAM COLLEGE OF COMMERCE
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

CO-AUTHOR: AMIR SHAMIM

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR- ADHOC
SATYAWATI COLLEGE (EVENING)
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

ABSTRACT
To study consumer buying behaviour has become one of the most important and complex task
for the organisations. In order to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors huge amount
of money and time is devoted to understand the nature of consumer buying process. This paper
aims to understand the process of consumer buying and the factors that influences such decision
making process.

INTRODUCTION
Kotler and Keller (2011) state that consumer buying behaviour is the study of the ways of buying
and disposing of goods, services, ideas or experiences by the individuals, groups and
organizations in order to satisfy their needs and wants.
Consumer buying behaviour focuses on how individuals make decisions to spend their available
resources (time, money, effort) on consumption-related items that includes what they buy, why
they buy, when they buy it, where they buy it, how often they buy it, how often they use it, how
they evaluate it after the purchase and the impact of such evaluations on future purchases, and
how they dispose of it.
Consumer Behaviour was a new field in the mid of late 1960, because the marketing theorists
borrowed the concepts from other scientific disciplinary that is Psychology, Sociology, Social
Psychology, Anthropology and Economics.

Factors influencing consumer's buying behaviour

There are four major factors that influence consumer's buying behaviour . These are:

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IRJMSH Vol 5 Issue 12 [Year 2014] ISSN 2277 9809 (0nline) 23489359 (Print)

CULTURAL factors include a consumers culture, subculture and social class. These
factors are often inherent in our values and decision processes.
SOCIAL factors include groups (reference groups, aspirational groups and member
groups), family, roles and status. This explains the outside influences of others on our
purchase decisions either directly or indirectly.
PERSONAL factors include such variables as age and lifecycle stage, occupation,
economic circumstances, lifestyle (activities, interests, opinions and demographics),
personality and self concept. These may explain why our preferences often change as our
`situation' changes.
PSCHOLOGICAL factors affecting our purchase decision include motivation (Maslow's
hierarchy of needs), perception, learning, beliefs and attitudes.
These factors help consumers to develop product and brand preferences.

Consumer buying decision process

When purchasing any product, a consumer goes through a decision process. This process
consists of up to five stages:

NEED RECOGNITION

INFORMATION SEARCH

EVALUATION OF ALTERNATIVES

BUYING DECISION

POST PURCHASE BEHAVIOUR

Consumer's buying behaviour and the resulting purchase decision are strongly influenced by
cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics. An understanding of these factors is
essential for marketers to develop suitable marketing mix to appeal to the target customer.

OBJECTIVES
The objective of the paper is to reach to an understanding about consumer buying behaviour with
the help of literature available in this area of research. To understand the factors and its impact
has been other area of interest.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Wu C. and Chen H.(2000); attempted to provide a more general framework to analyse the
customer's interpurchase time by considering the regularity of interpurchase time, adding
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IRJMSH Vol 5 Issue 12 [Year 2014] ISSN 2277 9809 (0nline) 23489359 (Print)

learning and the departure factors and including the heterogeneity of customer. They found that
the customer's interpurchase time can be extended to Erlang-c and still can be easy to estimate
and the consideration of the customer's learning and departure is shown to be necessary when we
treat the buying population as having easy exit and entry.
Juster T.(1966); concluded that surveys of consumer intentions to buy are inefficient predictors
of purchase rates because they do not provide accurate estimates of mean purchase probability
and consequently the intentions surveys cannot detect movements in mean probability among
non intenders, who account for the bulk of actual purchases and for most of the time-series
variance in purchase rates. They revealed the probability variable predicts more accurately than
the intentions variable largely because it divides non intenders, and those who report that they
"don't know" about their buying intentions, into subgroups with systematically different purchase
rates.
Lawrence R.(1966); observed that in a multi-brand market almost every customer has his own
individual pattern of brand purchases through time. Theoretical constructs are needed as a basis
for aggregating the data and reducing it to manageable proportions. They concluded that
consumer behaviour has been treated as a dichotomy, "bought brand A" and "bought some other
brand than A", in many models of decision processes but there is a risk that significant
differences in behaviour can be obscured. It has been argued that paired product comparisons are
misleading and should be abandoned. In the wider field of consumer purchasing it is also
desirable to allow for the multiple-choice situation of the marketplace and to devise analytical
methods which are capable of handling it in its full complexity.
Shepherd R., Magnusson M. and Sjdn P.(2005); conducted a number of studies of the
influences on consumer purchasing and consumption of organic foods. Health benefits were
demonstrated to be more strongly related to attitudes and behaviour toward organic foods than
were perceived environmental benefits. It was concluded that behavior-behaviour correlations
seem to be stronger than "belief"-behaviour correlations in the context of environmental
concerns.
Broderick A, Greenley G. and Mueller R.(2007); presents a generic strategic framework of
alternative international marketing strategies and market segmentation based on intra- and inter-
cultural behavioural homogeneity. They proposed Consumer involvement( CI) as a pivotal
construct to capture behavioural homogeneity, for the identification of market segments. They
found evidence for the cultural invariance of the measurement of CI, allowing a true comparison
of inter and intra-cultural behavioural homogeneity and how CI influences purchase behaviour,
and its evaluation provides information for responsive market segmentation.
Vitell S., Paolillo J and Singh J.(2006); investigated the roles that religiosity and ones money
ethic play in determining consumer attitudes/ beliefs in various situations regarding questionable
consumer practices. The results indicated that both intrinsic religiousness and one's money ethic
were significant determinants of most types of consumer ethical beliefs.
Kohli R., Devaraj S. and Mahmood M.(2004); presented a set of constructs and a method for
understanding and supporting consumers' decision-making process. Taken together, constructs
for the online consumers' decision-making steps (i.e. intelligence, design, and choice),
performance variables (cost savings, time savings), and overall channel satisfaction provide the

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conceptual basis for their model that they subsequently validate using data from online
consumers. Results indicated that support for the decision-making process was mediated by the
cost savings and time savings gained by the online consumers and led to their greater channel
satisfaction.
Estelami H.(2001); examined the role of four determinants: the amount of credit, the timing of
the payments, disaggregation of the credit obligations, and numeric presentation of the credit
amount. It was suggested that consumers' utilized discount rates significantly vary from those of
financial markets, and systematic effects of the above factors on discount rates are also found.
Carrington M., Neville B. and Whitwell G.(2010); observed that regardless of their ethical
intentions, ethically minded consumers rarely place ethical products in their shopping basket.
They have focused on understanding the relationships and disparities between the attitudes and
intentions of ethically minded consumers. They developed an understanding of ethical
consumerism by drawing on what is known about the intention-behaviour gap from consumer
behaviour and social psychology literatures and applying these insights to ethical consumerism.

Renault D.(2000); explained that consumer behaviour by way of emotions and feelings would
appear to be particularly appropriate in the artistic domain. They discussed that research on
cultural behaviour should be oriented towards the sensory, imaginative and emotional aspects of
the personal experience.

Pilati L. and Ricci G.(1995); explained that, under conditions of incomplete information, prices
generate rational expectations concerning the quality of the goods supplied on the market and
thus may act as indicators of quality. These results obtained by applying primal-dual
methodology to the problem of consumer show that when relative price acts as an indicator of
quality, also the demand of normal and inferior goods may denote a theoretical mis-specification.

CONCLUSION
The conclusion drawn is that better understanding the consumer buying behaviour through
studying and identifying their needs leads to huge long term benefits to the businesses. Despite
the great efforts to learn and understand the buying behaviour of consumers, it is very difficult to
identify the exact reasons why a consumer purchases and prefers one product or service over
another one. This is because consumers sometimes make purchasing decisions based on their
emotional beliefs which they even themselves are not well aware of.

SCOPE FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Future investigation might concentrate on the question of consumer heterogeneity and its
influence on his buying behaviour. Further research can also be carried to understand the
relationships and disparities between the attitudes and intentions of ethically minded consumers
and how they vary across both countries and consumer segments. The impacts of attitudes and
beliefs and also other potential types of influences, such as values and affective responses and
also belief - behaviour relationships, need to be more systematically tested.

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REFERENCES

1. Wu C. and Chen H.(2000), " A Consumer Purchasing Model with Learning and Departure
Behaviour", The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 51(5), 583-591.
2. Juster T.(1966), "Consumer Buying Intentions and Purchase Probability: An Experiment in
Survey Design", Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 61(315), 658-696.
3. Lawrence R.(1966), "Models of Consumer Purchasing Behaviour", Journal of the Royal
Statistical Society. Series C (Applied Statistics), Vol. 15(3), 216-233.
4. Shepherd R., Magnusson M. and Sjdn P.(2005), "Determinants of Consumer Behavior Related
to Organic Foods", Vol. 34,(4/5), 352-359.
5. Broderick A, Greenley G. and Mueller R.(2007), "The Behavioural Homogeneity Evaluation
Framework: Multi-Level Evaluations of Consumer Involvement in International Segmentation",
Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 38(5), 746-763.
6. Vitell S., Paolillo J and Singh J.(2006), "The Role of Money and Religiosity in Determining
Consumers' Ethical Beliefs", Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 64(2), 117-124.
7. Kohli R., Devaraj S. and Mahmood M.(2004), " Understanding Determinants of Online
Consumer Satisfaction: A Decision Process Perspective", Journal of Management Information
Systems, Vol. 21(1), 115-135.
8. Estelami H.(2001), "Determinants of Discount Rates in Consumer Credit Decisions ", Journal of
Marketing Theory and Practice, Vol. 9(1), 63-73.
9. Carrington M., Neville B. and Whitwell G.(2010), "Why Ethical Consumers Don't Walk Their
Talk: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Gap Between the Ethical Purchase Intentions
and Actual Buying Behaviour of Ethically Minded Consumers" , Journal of Business Ethics, Vol.
97(1), 139-158.
10. Renault D.(2000),"Evaluating Consumer Behaviour in the Field of Arts and Culture Marketing",
International Journal of Arts Management, Vol. 3(1), 4-18.
11. Pilati L. and Ricci G.(1995),"consumer behaviour under conditions of incomplete information on
quality", Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, Anno 103(2), pp. 317-332.
12. Kotler P. and Keller K. (2011) Marketing Management(14th edition), London: Pearson
Education.

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