Models of Consumer Behaviour

consumer buying behaviour

Tlie buying behaviour of final consumers -individuals and households "who buy goods and services for personal consumption.

eon sumo r market All the individuals and households who buy or acquire gvods and services fiir personal consumption.

In earlier times, marketers could understand consumers well through the daily experience of selling to them. But as firms and markets have grown in size, many marketing decision makers have lost direct contact with their customers and must now turn to consumer research. They spend more money than ever to study consumers, trying to learn more about consumer behaviour. Who buys? How do they buy? When do they buy? Where do they buy? Why do they buy?

The central question for marketers is; how do consumers respond to various marketing stimuli that the company might use? The company that really understands how consumers will respond to different product features, prices and advertising appeals has a great advantage over its competitors. Therefore, companies and academies have researched heavily the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer response. Their starting point is the stimulus -response model of buyer behaviour shown in Figure 6..1. This shows that marketing and other stimuli enter the consumer's 'black box1 and produce certain responses. Marketers must figure out what is in the buyer's black box.2

Marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. Other stimuli include significant forces and events in the buyer's environment; economic, technological, political and cultural. All these stimuli enter the buyer's black box, where they are turned into a set of observable buyer responses (shown on the right-hand side of Figure 6.1): product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing and purchase amount.

The marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses inside the consumer's black box, which has two parts. First, the buyer's characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli. Second, the buyer's decision process itself affects the buyer's behaviour. This chapter first looks at buyer characteristics as they affect buying behaviour, and then examines the buyer decision process. We will never know what exactly is in

Figure 6.1

Model of buyer behaviour the black box or be able perfectly to predict consumer behaviour, but the models can help us imderstand consumers, help us to ask the right questions, and teach us how to influence them.-1

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