Consumer markets and consumer buyer behaviour

Consumer markets and consumer buyer behaviour

Consumer buyer behaviour refers to the buying behaviour of consumers - that buy goods and services for personal consumption. All of these consumers combine to make the consumer market. The American consumer market consists of more than 314 million people who consume more than $15 trillion worth of goods and services each year, making it one of the most attract consumer markets in the world (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013).

Consumers are all different and vary in age, income, education level, and tastes. How these diverse consumers relate with each other and with other elements of the world around them impacts their choices among various products service and companies.

Consumers are face with making buying decision every day, and the buying decision is the focus point of the marketer’s effort. In order for marketers to understand what a consumer needs and wants, marketers should study real consumer purchases to find out what they buy, where and how much. However, learning consumer buying behaviour is not easy and often consumers themselves don’t know exactly what influences their purchases (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013).

Marketers can measure the what, when and where of consumer buying behaviour. But it is difficult to ‘see’ inside the consumers head. Marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to understand what makes consumers tick.

Consumer purchases can be influenced by cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics, marketers cannot control such factors, but they must been taken into account.

Culture. Culture is the basic cause of a person’s wants and behaviour. A child in the United States normally learns or is exposed to the following values: achievement and success, individualism, freedom, hard work, activity and involvement, efficiency and practicality, material comfort, youthfulness and fitness and health (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013). Every group of society has a culture, and cultural influences on buying behaviour may vary from both county to county and country to country. Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts so as to discover new products that might be wanted.

Subculture. Each culture contains smaller subcultures, or groups of people with shared values based on common life experiences and situations. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups and geographic regions. Armstrong & Kotler (2013) identified that subcultures make up important market segments and marketers often design products and marketing programmes tailored to their needs.

Social Factors. According to Armstrong & Kotler (2013), a consumer’s behaviour can be influenced by social factors. Social factors such as groups and social networks, word – of – mouth influence, opinion leader, family, role and status.

Personal Factors. A buyer’s decisions can be influenced by personal characteristics such as the buyer’s age and life – cycle stage, occupation, economic situation lifestyle and personality and self – concept.

Psychological Factors. A person’s buying choices are further influenced by four major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning beliefs and attitudes.

My next post I hope to write about Psychological factors.

Thank you for reading

References:

Armstrong, G. & Kotler, P. (2013). Marketing: An introduction, global edition (12th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education.