Decoding Consumer Behavior: Influences and Marketing Strategies
Consumer behavior is crucial for marketing professionals. To understand consumers, consider their everyday experiences. As companies and markets grow, marketing professionals can become detached from consumers. Many marketing decisions are based on market surveys to study buyers and their behavior: who, how, when, where, and why they buy.
A central question is: how do consumers respond to marketing stimuli? Do advertisements align with consumer needs?
According to Kotler, marketing research studies the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer responses. This involves investigating a stimulus-response model:
Marketing stimuli (product, price, promotion, and place) and other stimuli (economic, technological, political, and cultural) influence the consumer’s mind (buyer characteristics and the buying decision process), leading to the consumer’s purchase decision (product choice, brand choice, retailer choice, purchase timing, and purchase quantity).
Understanding consumer behavior is essential for marketing success. The success or failure of marketing fundamentally depends on how consumers react, both individually and as a group, to marketing efforts.
Consumer behavior includes the actions individuals take to obtain and use goods and services, including the decisions that precede these actions. Knowledge of consumer behavior is so important that studies have developed theories to interpret the desires and needs of different buyer groups. This field is interdisciplinary, involving psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Consumer behavior is influenced by a range of internal and external factors, from psychological components to environmental influences.
Internal factors include psychological components, personal values, and future expectations. External influences include the living environment, which shapes behavior. These factors can be internal needs, motives, and attitudes, while external factors can be families, social groups, culture, economy, and business influences.
Marketing professionals should study consumer desires, perceptions, preferences, and buying behavior. This study provides insights for developing new products, product features, pricing strategies, channels, messages, and other elements of the marketing mix.
- Cultural Factors: Culture, sub-culture, social classes
- Social Factors: Reference groups, family, social roles and positions
- Personal Factors: Age and lifecycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, personality and self-concept
- Psychological Factors: Motivation, perception, learning, beliefs, and attitudes
These factors collectively influence the buyer.