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.

Gamification in tourism

Game – based marketing offers a potentially new type of marketing opportunity in tourism. Gaming or electronic games provide players with an immersive and interactive entertainment experience often through dynamic and real – time interaction with their context, local organisations and fellow players (Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang 2015). The development of technology such as smartphones and tablets, gaming becomes mobile and allows dynamic interaction in the palm of the users’ hand.

According to researchers mobile games have changed the game players’ experience in a number of ways (Blum, Wetzel, Mccall, Oppermann, & Broll, 2012). One of the changes is that gaming experiences have been extended into the real world, and are available at any place and at any time (Benford, Magerkurth, & Ljungstand, 2005).

Recently, the application of game elements have been used in a non – gaming context called gamification, such as business, health and education (Xu, Webber, & Buhalis, 2014). Technology is designed to change attitudes and behaviours of users through persuasion and social influence (Bogost, 2007), without using deception.

As a new approach to promote tourism destinations, gaming provides tourism organisations and destination marketers with the opportunity to create informative and entertaining setting for successful brand awareness, interaction and communication. Middleton (1994) said that tourist decision – making is affected by both formal (advertising, internet and sales promotion) and informal channels of communication, which forms stimulus inputs.

Gaming has the potential to help develop experiences and support dynamic interactions, for example: location – based games can be a way of experiencing points of interests for tourists through a treasure hunt.

Some games often collect information about brand consumers, determine behaviour patterns, thought processes, priorities, and interests. Engaging users/tourists at a deeper level to help them conceptualise and improve their experience. An example is the Dublin Augmented Reality Project, which is funded by Dublin City Council to develop a mobile augmented reality (AR) application for the tourism industry in Dublin.

Gaming in tourism is a new and emerging area. However, it is very challenging as designers need to have an understanding of both the tourists’ needs and the gamers’ desires, and then blend them together to deliver memorable, fun and engaging gaming experience.

The use of games in the tourism industry may potentially provide great marketing opportunities. Tourism is an experience industry (Pine & Gilmore, 2011) that is increasingly based on personalisable services. According to the World Travel Market Report (2011), gamification is a major trend for the coming years in tourism, which will appeal to consumers across all age demographics.

There current use of gaming by the tourism industry can be divided into two types:

1.    Social games – based on social media such as Facebook, which are mainly used for brand awareness, to attract potential customers, and to build up a destination or a company image.

2.   Location based – are mainly used to encourage more engagement on – site, to enhance tourists’ on – site experiences at the destination in a more fun and informative way (Waltz & Ballagas, 2007).

Conclusion

For gamification to become effective and useful for the travel and tourism industry, a sufficient understanding of players’ motives and gaming experience will need to be considered in order to design the games. Gamification can help to make marketing personalised for tourism and will also provide the opportunity to build online communities. Destinations around the world are investing more in how to use ICT in destination management and marketing. Gaming can enhance tourists’ interest in the destination, provide experience and knowledge which is otherwise not available.

References:

Benford, S., Magerkurth, C., Ljungstrand, P. (2005). Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming. Communications of the ACM, 48 (3), 54 – 57. doi: 10.1145/1047671

Blum, L., Wetzel, R., Mccall, R., Oppermann, L., & Broll, W. (2012). The final timewarp: Using form and content to support player experience and presence when designing location – aware mobile augmented reality games. In Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (pp. 711 – 720).

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang (2015): Tourists as Mobile Gamers: Gamification for Tourism Marketing. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing. doi: 10.1080/10548408.2015.1093999

Middleton, V. T. C. (1994). Marketing in travel and tourism. Oxford: Butterworth – Heinemann

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (2011). The experience economy, updated version. Watertown, MA: Harvard Business School.

Waltz, S. P., & Ballagas, R. (2007, September 24 – 28). Pervasive persuasive: A rhetorical design approach to a location – based spell – casing game for tourists In Proceedings of situated play. DiGRA 2007 – The 3^rd international digital games research conference (pp. 489 – 597). Tokyo.

Xu, F., Webber, J., & Buhalis, D. (2014, January 21 – 4). The gamification of tourism. In Z. Xiang & I. Tussyadiah (Eds.), Information and communication technologies in tourism 2014 (pp. 525 – 537). Wein: Springer. Proceedings of the international Conference in Dublin. Yee, N. (2006). Motivations for play in online games. Cyber Psychology & Behavior, 9 (6), 772 – 775. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

Marketing Planning

A marketing plan beings with the identification (through market research) of specific customer needs and how the firms intends to fulfil them while generating an acceptable level of return. Marketing is the process of developing and implementing a plan to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer demand, in such a way as to make a profit.

A sensible way to manage the sales and marketing of a company is to find a systematic way of identifying a range of options, to choose one or more of them, then to schedule and cost out what has to be done to achieve the objective (McDonald, 1999).

Marketing planning is a logical sequence and a series of activities leading to the setting of marketing objectives and the formulation of plans for achieving them. Companies go through a kind of management process in developing marketing plans. This process is usually informal to small undiversified companies. However, in larger diversified organisation, the process is often systematised.

This process is simple and involves a situation review, the formulation of some basic assumptions, setting objectives for what is being sold to whom, deciding on how the objectives are to be achieved.

The marketing plan focuses on issues relating to the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.

Managers have to consider the following questions when making a marketing plan:

Product – Who will buy it and why? How is it better than its competitors?

Price – What pricing strategy will the company choose? Is the plan to sell large volumes so that economies of scale can keep the price low?

Place – How will the product be distributed? Will it be sold by retail stores or by direct marketing?

Businesses should also consider using the SWOT analysis - looking at the products Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Promotion – What is the advertising strategy? How will the product be packaged? What will its marketplace positioning be? (Alvarez, Raeside, & Jones, 2006).

A marketing strategy forms part of a marketing plan. It explains how a product will be distinguished from its competitors. A sales plan should then give details of promotional events and campaigns that will deliver the strategy.

References

McDonald, M. (1999). Marking plans: How to prepare them, how to use them (4th ed.). Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers.

Alvarez, J., Raeside, R., & Jones, W., (2006). The importance of analysis and planning in customer relationship marketing. Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 13 (3), 222 - 230. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/docview/233329202/fulltextPDF?accountid=11526.

Share a Coke

Share a Coke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X8Bd3-G6IU

In 2013 and 2014, Coca - Cola swapped their famous logo with people's names, so that people could Share a Coke with others. Each of the bottles and cans carried #ShareaCoke hashtag to encourage people to promote the brand online.

The most popular UK names were selected and printed on labels and made even more available online. This marketing campaign was one of the company's most successful campaigns.

Marketing Director Lucie Austin and Creative Excellence Lead Jeremy Rudge came up with the idea for Share a Coke from offices in Sydney in 2011. After being presented with a standout visual - a wall of Coca - Cola cans stacked on shop shelves, each with different names on. The company found a truly shareable idea that made headlines and captured the Australian public's attention (Grimes, 2013). 

The campaign had:

• Over a thousand names on Coca - Cola bottles and cans
• 998 million impressions on Twitter
• 235,000 tweets from 111,000 fans using the #ShareaCoke
• More than 150 million personalised bottles sold
• Over 730,000 glass bottles personalised via e - commerce store
• 17,000 virtual name bottles shared online across Europe
• 65 experiential stops on the Share a Coke tour
• Young adult consumption increased significantly, up by 7%

Source: (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Since the UK campaign was launched in April, it became a big hit. From a social perspective, Coca - Cola saw it's Facebook community grow by 3.5% and globally by 6.8%. A study from YouGov in May 2013, using it's BrandIndex, Coca - Cola had also increased it's Buzz score, moving it from negative to positive (Grimes, 2013).

In April 2013, Coca - Cola released the first 150 names on bottles. Then sent a select few as gift to celebrities and then let the public discover them in - store for themselves, so they could be the first to break the news on social media (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Everyone loves something that's personal an unique to him or her, even if it is just a drink. It became apparent that personalised content is a core focus - 78% of consumers feel that brands that create unique and personalised content are more interest in building a relationship with them (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Coca - Cola's marketing campaign was an effective one as it allowed people to use social media to promote their product. When the company put names on bottles it give people a personal connection and interaction with the brand. 

References:

Coca - Cola. (2015). The Share a Coke story. Retrieved from http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/stories/history/advertising/share-a-coke/. 

Grimes, T. (2013, July 24). What the Share a Coke Campaign can teach other brands. the guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/jul/24/share-coke-teach-brands 

Sainsbury’s Christmas Advert 2015 – Mog’s Christmas Calamity

Sainsbury’s campaign is partnered with the charity – Save the Children. Save the Children is hoping to improve child literacy across the UK under its Read On, Get On initiative.

In 2014, Sainsbury’s First World War – themed Christmas campaign featured enemy soldiers exchanging food and gifts in the trenches. In 2015, Sainsbury’s continue the “Christmas is for sharing” motto with its advert Mog’s Christmas Calamity which promotes children’s literacy.

The advert tells the tale of how Mog manages to destroy a kitchen on Christmas Eve in a series of unfortunate incidents – but ends up being praised as a hero for accidentally alerting the fire brigade. The heart – warming tale which sees the neighbours come together to share what they have so Mog’s family can have a perfect Christmas.

Sainsbury’s advert is funny and heart – warming at the same time, the advert shows viewers the meaning of sharing. Many viewers who have seen the advert may be able to relate to this advert, as things do not always go the way we want them to at Christmas.  

Brand and Brand Loyalty

Brand and Brand Loyalty

What is a brand?

A distinguishing symbol, mark, logos, name, word, sentence or a combination of these items that companies use to distinguish their product from others (SlideShare, 2012).

A brand is a name or symbol which identifies a product. A successful brand identifies a product as having sustainable, competitive advantage (McDonald, 1999).

A brand is not just a physical product but a relationship with the customer, a relationship that is personified either by the company’s name or by brand name on the product itself. ICI, IBM, BMW and Shell are examples of company brand names. Persil, Coca – Cola, Foster Lager, Dulux paint and Castrol GTX are examples of product brand names.

Most people are aware of the Coca – Cola/Pepsi – Cola blind taste test in which little difference was perceived when the colas were drunk ‘blind’. On revealing the labels, 65 per cent of consumers claimed to prefer Coca – Cola. Consumers who drunk Coca – Cola on a regular basis (brand loyalty) would be able to differentiate between Coca – Cola and Pepsi Cola (McDonald, 1999).

Brand Loyalty

In Marketing, brand loyalty refers to a consumers’ commitment to repurchase or continue using a particular brand by repeatedly buying a product or service (SlideShare, 2012).

Brand Awareness is the likelihood that consumers recognise the existence and availability of a company’s product or service (SlideShare, 2012).

Brand Equity is the value premium that a company realises from a product with a recognisable name as compared to its generic equivalent. Companies can create brand equity for their product by making them memorable, easily recognisable and superior in quality and reliability. Marketing campaigns can also help to create brand equity (SlideShare, 2012).

How companies build brand loyalty?

There are a number of steps to building brand loyalty:

Step 1 – Focus on your customers

Building your business around your customers – known as brand lovers – instead of aimlessly drive sales. Apple is masterful at creating products especially for customers who love style, creativity and simplicity.

Step 2 – Listen to your customers

Listen to what your customers tell you, don’t be a transaction – making machine. Be a real person to serve your business to real people. Care about your customers and they might care about your business. For example, Southwest Airlines isn't just another airlines to its loyal customers who perceive Southwest as the ‘heart of the sky’.

Step 3 – Understand what makes your customers tick

Learn how customers think, fell and behave towards your brand this will build brand loyalty. Talk to your customers, read their comments about your company and your products on the web, read blog posts and most importantly listen to what your customers are saying.

Step 4 – Determine why your customers choose you

Why are your customers buying from you instead of your competitors? Knowing the answer to that question can define the future of your business and the level of brand loyalty you cultivate. Understand what drives your customer’s choices isn't easy as you need to know what motivates customer’s buying decisions.

Step 5 – Be relentless in giving the best service

Give loyal customers plenty of reasons to stay with you and minimise any reasons for your customers to use other competitors. Push your business, to continually find ways to make your customers’ lives easier and better. Brands like Amazon.com and Netflix are constantly finding ways to enhance the customer experience by refining algorithms to recommend products and movies their customers will enjoy.

Step 6 – Find ways to surprise your customers

Do something extraordinary and unexpected for your customers. Give your customers something worth talking about and word of mouth will happen naturally. For example, online retailer Zappos is masterful at producing the wow factor and providing free, surprise upgrades to overnight delivery, random gifts and hand – written notes to their customers.

Step 7 – Focus on what your brand does best

Be bold and unique, differentiate your brand around your strengths. Ritz Carlton is a hotels of ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. Volkswagen Beetle has built a distinctive brand around a special little car.

Step 8 – Deliver on your brand’s promise

First, determine what your brand stand for, then become relentless in your dedication to deliver on your brand promise each and every day. Harley – Davidson customers love the free of the open road and the brand promises that freedom. Oprah stands for empowerment, hope, and the promise of a better tomorrow.

Source: (The cult branding company, 2013).

In conclusion, brand and brand loyalty is important to gain customers and keep them, the more recognised a brand is, the quality of products and services and the experience a customer gains from your company will keep customers coming back for more. Follow a few simple steps can help to improve a better connection with customers.

References:

McDonald, M. (1999). Marketing Plans (4th ed.). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

SlideShare. (2012). Brand Loyalty. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/jonsut/brand-loyalty-13975898.

The cult branding company. (2013). Eight Steps to Building Brand Loyalty. Retrieved from http://cultbranding.com/ceo/eight-steps-building-brand-loyalty/. 

Build your own Mercedes – Benz GLA on Instagram

In 2014, Mercedes – Benz USA said it was taking vehicle customisation “one step further” by bringing the experience to Instagram via the handle @GLA_Build_Your_Own, which allowed Instagram users to build their own version of the luxury SUV with a few simple taps in the app.

Instagram users just had to search for the user @GLA_Build_Your_Own and tap the image to start. With 132 possible combinations, users could choose the colour, wheels, roof and grille. Once users had completed building their dream Mercedes, an image of their vehicle would appear with a message “Take this pic to your local Mercedes – Benz dealer to get started”.

In order to build the experience, the brand created hundreds of Instagram accounts, uploaded more than a thousand images, in order to target “digitally savvy constituency” meaning targeting a group of customers who support or who are likely to support something and customers who own high – tech such as IPhones and IPads. The campaign targets consumers who engage in internet activities including social media.

Mercedes’ GLA model launched in September 2014, Mercedes calls it “the success of” it #GLAPacked Instagram Campaign. According to Mark Aikman, department manager of digital marketing and CRM for Mercedes – Benz USA, that ‘success’ refers in part to the influencers who helped Mercedes flesh out the campaign including Pro golfer Rickie Fowler who helped the brand reach “ a tremendous number of people through their own channels”.

Mr. Aikman said “that would be one of the big successes we saw – people learning about cars and talking about cars”.

This campaign worked for a number of reasons: it’s was a great way to reach the target audience, it involved the idea of a familiar build your own web tool, it worked because it tells a visual story and because it allows buyers to essentially vision their own vehicle giving this campaign a personal touch. The campaign allows customers to interact and be involved in building their own car giving it a personalised touch.

http://www.momentology.com/2465-mercedes-is-using-instagram-to-woo-generation-y/