Consumer and Buyer Behavior
We're continuing to move from macro to micro. We started with the "market," added the "marketing environment," moved on to "target marketing" and carried out market segmentation, looked at the characteristics of the segments, and now we're turning to the considerations and processes by which individual customers/buyers make purchase decisions, looking at both buyers and users.
The final stage, of course, will be examining the buyer's behavior in the context of "sales."
Customers and END USERS. This isn't just a matter of semantics.
Customers often act as intermediaries, agents or go-betweens on the way to the product's END USER.
For example: a purchasing manager at an industrial firm buys raw materials that someone else will use.
The user defines the needs or writes the specifications, but the person actually sitting across from the marketer and/or salesperson is the purchasing manager.
Even a woman shopping for her household is often acting as an "intermediary," representing needs and wants that aren't her own.
You can find similar patterns in services, too. It's very important for marketers to understand this "role play" and classify customers correctly.
Describing and classifying the customer continues with defining him in terms used in the marketing process:
- How much he buys from us
- His own annual turnover
- The kind of business he's in
The above applies to business customers, of course, but private customers can be classified too, using demographic characteristics (as mentioned in the previous chapter) such as geographic location, age, occupation, education, socioeconomic status and so on.
Another, no less important, issue is identifying the decision makers within the group or market. Often there's more than one person involved in the organization. This is especially true in industrial organizations, where a "committee" usually makes decisions together.
In that case, the marketing effort has to be aimed at each and every member of the committee.
This kind of committee is called a DECISION MAKING UNIT (DMU).
It turns out that besides having to identify the decision makers in such a group, you'll usually find differences of opinion and conflicts within the DMU.
That means sending different messages to each member of the group, according to his leanings.
A DMU isn't always a formal group. It can also be a husband and wife making decisions together. But even in a smaller group there can still be (and usually are) different interests and views. Without knowing this background, you can't guide salespeople or choose the right advertising approach.
Many studies, along with plenty of hands-on experience, show that customers often make buying decisions that seem unwise or uneconomical.
Quite often people buy equipment that is (for no good reason) the most expensive, or less reliable and technically weaker than the competition. The obvious question, of course, is: why?
The explanation is that buying considerations and the way consumers make decisions don't operate in a vacuum. They're influenced by subjective factors, by the buyer's past experience, by a set of priorities different from ours, by environmental and other influences, and they can be described by several models that are fundamentally different from one another.
So it seems there's no single holistic approach that can describe the buying habits of the entire population. Instead, there are several models, each suited to a different population of buyers.
The Rational/Economic Model
This approach comes from economics, as an attempt to understand consumer behavior and how people spend their disposable income. According to this model, the customer tries to get the maximum satisfaction or return for his money/investment. It shows up as thorough research and comparison.
You'll hear it in questions like "What am I getting for my money?"... and see it in lots of comparisons.
These buyers make up about 30% of the population.
The Pavlovian Learning Model
According to this approach, learning is an associative process, and buying decisions are the result of reward or punishment. The emphasis is mainly on the things that come "along with" the product...
In cases like this, the advertiser will use basic motivators such as hunger, thirst, heat, cold or sex.
This customer is influenced mainly by gifts, promotions, raffles, "deals" and the like.
The Freudian Psychoanalytic Model
This approach starts from the assumption that the individual is an extremely complex being whose cognition is made up of emotional and rational elements working together.
Marketers who adopt this approach use messages that are picked up by the subconscious but still drive behavior and encourage buying. Marketing activities based on this model will play on customers' dreams, expectations (sometimes inflated), hopes and fears.
A customer like this will describe his dreams and desires during the purchase, even if they're unrealistic.
The Sociological Model
According to this approach, man is a "social animal," exposed to the influence of the people around him, near and far, whom he identifies with. A customer with a "sociological approach" will try to figure out "what people do" or "what's acceptable" and act accordingly.
In these cases, marketers will try to pin down the accepted behaviors of reference groups and use them, pointing to what's "normal" and "acceptable"...