Marketing session 4

Consumer Buying Behaviour

A. Introduction
B. The buying process
C. Different purchasing models
D. Drivers of consumer behaviour
E. Extensions

A. Introduction:
“Understanding the drivers of the consumers buying behaviours and in
understanding the process from feeling the need to buying the product.”

Example, why buy a coffee? Where? Why? How? The process you go through is
very different if it’s for a coffee (habit, rational decision making process) or
travelling (information/decision making process).

Buying behaviour
- When products are complex and expensive customers apply what is
known as rational decision-making. Example buying a house:
- Gaining a thorough in-depth customer understanding helps to make sure
that the right products are marketed to the right customers in the right
way.
- When? What? Where? How? Who? Why?

B. The buying process- rational DM

1) Need Recognition: why you are buying, purpose, goal, this is the driver.
Motivation: a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek
satisfaction of the need and activate goal directed behaviours, needs or
Value
- Needs: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: many critiques on this
approach, the needs are the same but not arranged in a pyramid.
 Need is something that is necessary for humans to live a healthy
life. This pyramid structure is left to some criticisms, it is too
simplistic, too culture bound (only adapts to western culture), and
it emphasises individual needs over the group needs.

- Value set in emotional, this is to do with equal rights. Values tend

to influence attitudes and behaviours. Values are put into a list by
Kahle’s or into a system of values but Rokeach ( values ends and
values means).

2) Information search: on Internet, state of heightened attention to

information you are passive, active information search.
- Several sources of information may be used as part of the
information search. Internal=memory, external= other usually
sellers, third parties. Quantity, Quality, Reliability (authority/trust)
word from mouth is usually thought to be very trust worthy and
advertising not.
- The stage in which the consumer is aroused to search for more
information, state of heightened attention to information known as
passive and the active information search.

3) Evaluation alternative: is based on the attributes that will provide to

you. You go somewhere on the bases of what it means to you
Features v’s Attribute v’s Benefit.
a) Means-Ends Chain Theory: Customers choose products on the basis
of their attributes in order to obtain their own desired goals, by means
of benefits or consequences they bring about.

b) Laddering technique:
- Why did you chose that? Why is that important to you?
- Understand the attribute and the desired state. Organic food example
 - Techniques to discover linkages

c) Hierarchical Value Map: a structure or network of attributes and

value.
- The network of relations connecting attributes, consequences and
desired end states

4) Purchase decision
 Predictably irrational: power of relativity, example of the blind
test, why we love free? Because free stuff there is no down side to
it. The stage in which the consumer makes a decision about which
product they buy.
 The factors may interfere with realization of purchase intentions:
attitudes of others and unexpected situational factors, context
dependence.
 The camera example, extremist aversion: happens regularly
 Theory of planned behaviour or reason action. Attitude towards
the behaviour, perceived behavioural control and what the others
think.
5) Post purchase behaviour
- Concepts of satisfaction, dissatisfaction and delight
- Consumption, and post satisfaction
6) Participants in the Buying Process
- Family, couples, groups,

C. DIFFERENT PURCHASE MODELS:

1) BENEFITS:
- This is the object of the purchase, is it the bundle of benefits or utilities that
consumers are choosing when they buy the value offer of their supplier
- Based on attributes of the offer and experience attached to it.

2) EVALUTATION MODEL
a) Affect-based
 b) Attribute based: how to go about evaluation, taking into account the
attributes.
I. Compensatory: The Fishbein index: Expected Value

II. Non-Compensatory: lexicographic, conjunctive, disjunctive.

D. DRIVERS OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

Cultural  Social  Personal  Psychological  Buyer

Cultural: the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior, subculture and
social class
Social: Groups, Family, Role and Status
Personal: Age, Occupation, Economic situation, Lifestyle, Personality,
Psychological: is a process of Motivation (need/value), perception (Muller Lyer
Illusion, Escher, learning and memory (STM, LTM)
Perception:
- Bias, even interpreting objective information, (Escher).
- Process by which people select, organize and interpret information to
form a meaningful picture of the world
- What we see is a function of out hypothesis
- The way in which we are provided with information.
- Not only misleading but even more on very complex subjects.

E. EXTENSIONS: Changes to the Rational DM model:

a) Impulse Buying: immediate and doesn’t come after a process of analysis
and evaluation.
b) Hedonic choice processes: behaviours very often is not goal directed and
buying model is not functional or utilitarian (functional)
c) Influence of emotions