Consumer and business buyer behaviour
Consumer behaviour
- Consumer buyer behaviour: individuals and households that buy goods and services for
personal consumption creating the consumer market. Their behaviour refers to the way they
acquire, use and consumer and dispose the products and services
- The type of purchase affects how the buyer moves through this process but it may not be in the
linear steps.
Acquisition process: Information search (level 2)
- Overt or passive search
- Whats available? Where and how much?
- Use existing knowledge or external information
- The amount and extent of information research depends on the type of product and type of
consumer buying
Types of consumer buying/consumer decision
- Impulse/Habitual buying behaviour is where we skip straight to purchase
• Unplanned
• No information gathered
• Urge to buy
• Low insolvent
- Routine/Variety-seeking buying behaviour also involve little search
• Frequently purchased
• Low-cost
• Low risk items
• Little search and decision effort
• Low involvement
- Limited/Dissonance-reducing buying behaviour
• Less frequent
• Moderate information needed
• Moderate deliberation needed
,- Extensive/Complex buying behaviour
• Not bought frequently
• Expensive
• High-risk
• Lots of information needed and comparing alternatives is crucial
• High involvement
Acquisition process: Evaluation (level 3)
- Assessing alternatives
- Decide buying criteria
- Rank criteria
- Trading off criteria
Acquisition process: Selection (level 4)
- From the considered set which best meet needs, here we select the one that suits our needs
better
- Checking availability, and assessing purchasing conditions before completing the purchase
Acquisition process: Purchase (level 5)
- Do we buy it or not buy it?
Acquisition process: Re-evaluation (level 6)
- Did we buy right? Did we get a good deal?
- Re-evaluation is also known as post-purchase rationalisation. For many purchases, we have a
moment of ‘self-doubt’ and must convince ourselves we made a good decision.
- Feeling psychological discomfort is linked to feeling conflict if we experience something altering
the sentiment, beliefs, attitudes or opinions we previously had for something or someone. This
is called the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)
- Our minds work to reduce dissonance by:
• Avoiding similar situations
• Adjusting out beliefs to realign them
• Neutralising
• Reducing exposure: selective forgetting
• Reversing purchase decision
- Brands try to reduce dissonance by things like refunds, exchanges, positive reviews, free help
services, send you a confrontation letter to assure you you have made the best choice..
,Factor influencing buying decision
- Cultural and social factors
• Reference groups: social identification such as membership groups, aspirational groups..
• Roles and family: social self and actual self, family as the most important consumer buying
unit in society, roles and status as purchases project an image of ourselves to others
• Social classes: relatively permanent as a result of a mix of income, education, occupation,
interests and values… they tend to show similar buying behaviour.
• Cultures and sub cultures: this creates learned values, wants and behaviours and varies
across countries. Within a culture, there are smaller groups of people with shared values,
experiences, preferences.
- Personal factors
• Age and life cycle stage, Occupation, Economic situation, Lifestyle, Personality and self-
concept
• Personal influencing factors are unique to each person
- Demographic factors such as age, sex, race, income, occupation, family lifecycle
- Situational factors such as external circumstances or conditions that exist when a
consumer is making a purchase decision
- Level of involvement “high or low” in the search for a product in a particular situation
- Personality factors are important in creating preference for brands (brand loyalty and brand
reputation)
• BIG 5 PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS - this allows brands to categorise and classify
clients into different personality types or the so-called traits.
- Psychological factors
• Motivation; a pressing need we need to satisfy
• Perception: how we select and organise information to understand the world
- It is based on prior attitudes, beliefs, needs, stimuli and situational factors. It is a cognitive
impression of reality which influences the individual’s actions and behaviour towards that
object
- We create our own perception by filtering information:
• Selective attention= screening out most of the information to which someone is
exposed
• Selective distortion= interpreting information in a way that supports what they already
believe
• Selective retention= remembering good points about a brand they like and forgetting
good points about competing brands
• Learning: How we change out behaviour from experience
• Beliefs: thoughts we hold on something based on knowledge, opinion, faith…
• Attitudes: consistently favourable or unfavourable evaluations or feelings towards a person or
object
, Consumer Motivations
Learning and Memory
- Classical Conditioning- form of associative learning where your mind is intentionally trained to
associate different behaviours or feelings with products or brands. It is frequently used in
marketing through the use of:
• Jingles in advertising (sonic brand identity elements)
• Supermarkets include bakery sections to cause consumers to buy more as they associate
the smell of warm bread with eating
• Perfume and aftershave manufacturers place free samples sachets in magazines so that
when readers see an ad for their brand they link it to the sample, its smell, its texture and the
feel of it… so they are more likely to purchase the product when they see their image
elsewhere
- Operant Conditioning- process of learning and describes how reinforcement or punishment
modifies an individual's behaviour. ... In the same fashion, a behaviour occurs less often if the
result is negative, a punishment eg supermarket’s or retailers’ reward cards and point for
purchasing items
- Social Learning- learning not only from how we respond to situations but also how others
respond to situations, known as modelling. Social learning in other words is the observation of
others’ behaviour.
- Companies have long recognised the power of peers, particularly in the social media world,
encouraging purchasers to leave reviews, like their pages or products and share their messages
- Our memories, as a system of storing perceptions, experience and knowledge, are highly
complex (Brettman, 1979). A variety of memorising processes can affect consumer choice,
including the following:
• Factors affecting recognition and recall
• The context
• Form of coding and storage in memory
• Lead processing effects
• Input mode effects
• Repetition effects
Consumer behaviour
- Consumer buyer behaviour: individuals and households that buy goods and services for
personal consumption creating the consumer market. Their behaviour refers to the way they
acquire, use and consumer and dispose the products and services
- The type of purchase affects how the buyer moves through this process but it may not be in the
linear steps.
Acquisition process: Information search (level 2)
- Overt or passive search
- Whats available? Where and how much?
- Use existing knowledge or external information
- The amount and extent of information research depends on the type of product and type of
consumer buying
Types of consumer buying/consumer decision
- Impulse/Habitual buying behaviour is where we skip straight to purchase
• Unplanned
• No information gathered
• Urge to buy
• Low insolvent
- Routine/Variety-seeking buying behaviour also involve little search
• Frequently purchased
• Low-cost
• Low risk items
• Little search and decision effort
• Low involvement
- Limited/Dissonance-reducing buying behaviour
• Less frequent
• Moderate information needed
• Moderate deliberation needed
,- Extensive/Complex buying behaviour
• Not bought frequently
• Expensive
• High-risk
• Lots of information needed and comparing alternatives is crucial
• High involvement
Acquisition process: Evaluation (level 3)
- Assessing alternatives
- Decide buying criteria
- Rank criteria
- Trading off criteria
Acquisition process: Selection (level 4)
- From the considered set which best meet needs, here we select the one that suits our needs
better
- Checking availability, and assessing purchasing conditions before completing the purchase
Acquisition process: Purchase (level 5)
- Do we buy it or not buy it?
Acquisition process: Re-evaluation (level 6)
- Did we buy right? Did we get a good deal?
- Re-evaluation is also known as post-purchase rationalisation. For many purchases, we have a
moment of ‘self-doubt’ and must convince ourselves we made a good decision.
- Feeling psychological discomfort is linked to feeling conflict if we experience something altering
the sentiment, beliefs, attitudes or opinions we previously had for something or someone. This
is called the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)
- Our minds work to reduce dissonance by:
• Avoiding similar situations
• Adjusting out beliefs to realign them
• Neutralising
• Reducing exposure: selective forgetting
• Reversing purchase decision
- Brands try to reduce dissonance by things like refunds, exchanges, positive reviews, free help
services, send you a confrontation letter to assure you you have made the best choice..
,Factor influencing buying decision
- Cultural and social factors
• Reference groups: social identification such as membership groups, aspirational groups..
• Roles and family: social self and actual self, family as the most important consumer buying
unit in society, roles and status as purchases project an image of ourselves to others
• Social classes: relatively permanent as a result of a mix of income, education, occupation,
interests and values… they tend to show similar buying behaviour.
• Cultures and sub cultures: this creates learned values, wants and behaviours and varies
across countries. Within a culture, there are smaller groups of people with shared values,
experiences, preferences.
- Personal factors
• Age and life cycle stage, Occupation, Economic situation, Lifestyle, Personality and self-
concept
• Personal influencing factors are unique to each person
- Demographic factors such as age, sex, race, income, occupation, family lifecycle
- Situational factors such as external circumstances or conditions that exist when a
consumer is making a purchase decision
- Level of involvement “high or low” in the search for a product in a particular situation
- Personality factors are important in creating preference for brands (brand loyalty and brand
reputation)
• BIG 5 PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS - this allows brands to categorise and classify
clients into different personality types or the so-called traits.
- Psychological factors
• Motivation; a pressing need we need to satisfy
• Perception: how we select and organise information to understand the world
- It is based on prior attitudes, beliefs, needs, stimuli and situational factors. It is a cognitive
impression of reality which influences the individual’s actions and behaviour towards that
object
- We create our own perception by filtering information:
• Selective attention= screening out most of the information to which someone is
exposed
• Selective distortion= interpreting information in a way that supports what they already
believe
• Selective retention= remembering good points about a brand they like and forgetting
good points about competing brands
• Learning: How we change out behaviour from experience
• Beliefs: thoughts we hold on something based on knowledge, opinion, faith…
• Attitudes: consistently favourable or unfavourable evaluations or feelings towards a person or
object
, Consumer Motivations
Learning and Memory
- Classical Conditioning- form of associative learning where your mind is intentionally trained to
associate different behaviours or feelings with products or brands. It is frequently used in
marketing through the use of:
• Jingles in advertising (sonic brand identity elements)
• Supermarkets include bakery sections to cause consumers to buy more as they associate
the smell of warm bread with eating
• Perfume and aftershave manufacturers place free samples sachets in magazines so that
when readers see an ad for their brand they link it to the sample, its smell, its texture and the
feel of it… so they are more likely to purchase the product when they see their image
elsewhere
- Operant Conditioning- process of learning and describes how reinforcement or punishment
modifies an individual's behaviour. ... In the same fashion, a behaviour occurs less often if the
result is negative, a punishment eg supermarket’s or retailers’ reward cards and point for
purchasing items
- Social Learning- learning not only from how we respond to situations but also how others
respond to situations, known as modelling. Social learning in other words is the observation of
others’ behaviour.
- Companies have long recognised the power of peers, particularly in the social media world,
encouraging purchasers to leave reviews, like their pages or products and share their messages
- Our memories, as a system of storing perceptions, experience and knowledge, are highly
complex (Brettman, 1979). A variety of memorising processes can affect consumer choice,
including the following:
• Factors affecting recognition and recall
• The context
• Form of coding and storage in memory
• Lead processing effects
• Input mode effects
• Repetition effects
