Was running late this morning. Talking about the importance of knowing your customers.60% of car purchases are made by women. 80% are influenced by women. This principle extends to many products. Don’t assume that only the most obvious consumers of a product are important to market to.
Consumer Purchase Decision Process
- Perceive a need — Find a problem.
- Information search — This can mean internal searching, from memory and past experience, or external searching using various sources.
- Evaluate Alternatives — Assess value. Set criteria for evaluation. This may or may not be a very conscious process. Choices will be made from the consideration set, which is all the brands or options consumer thinks are worthwhile. The vast majority of the time, consumers will end up making purchases from within their consideration set. It’s possible for the consideration set to be one, or nearly one. This is common when dealing with a frequently repeated purchase.
- Purchase Decision — Buy the alternative which gives the most perceived value.
- Postpurchase Behavior — Get value from consumption or use of product. Sometimes prone to cognitive dissonance, aka buyer’s remorse. Taking steps to reduce or prevent buyer’s remose is common and often valuable.
The larger and more unusual the purchase to the consumer, the longer that consumer will spend in each stage of the purchasing process, and the more formally they will adhere to the process.
Situational Influences on Consumer Behavior
- Purchase Task
- Social Surroundings — Internet influences this a lot. People make different purchasing decisions when they’re being watched vs. when they’re alone.
- Physical surroundings
- Temporal Effects
- Antecedent States
Psychological Influences on Consumer Behavior
- Motivation
- Personality — Your consistent response to situations. Often personality characteristics are revealed by their self-concept.
- Perception — How you find and organize information to build a picture of the world.
- Selective Perception — Exposure to information, comprehension of information, and retention of information are all subject to human inclination.
- Perceived Risk — The anxieties one feels due to risk a purchase will be suboptimal.
- Learning
- Behavioral Learning — Developing automatic responses to situations.
- Cognitive Learning — Reasoning.
- Brand Loyalty — Favorable attitude towards purchase of a particular product or company’s products.