 Marketing Management, 4/e Harper W Boyd
Orville C Walker, Jr
John W Mullins
Jean-Claude Larreche
Understanding Consumer Buying Behavior Provides the foundation for Marketing Decisions
Chapter Overview- Not all purchase decisions are equally important or psychologically involving for the consumer. People engage in a more extensive decision-making process, involving a more detailed search for information and comparison of alternatives, when buying high-involvement goods and services than when purchasing more mundane, low-involvement items.
- Because of the differences in the decision-making process, a given marketing strategy will not be equally effective for both high- and low-involvement products. The consumer marketer’s first task, then, is to determine whether the majority of potential customers in the target segment are likely to be highly involved with the purchase decision or not.
- Because consumers are generally unwilling to spend much time or effort evaluating alternative brands in a low-involvement product category before making a purchase, marketers need to focus their promotional messages on only a few frequently repeated points and to distribute such products extensively to make them convenient for customers to buy.
- Regardless of the consumer’s level of involvement with a product category, consumers often prefer different brands because of differences in their psychological or personal characteristics, such as their perceptions, memories, attitudes, and lifestyles. Understanding how such characteristics influence consumers’ decisions in a product category provides an important foundation for marketing decisions concerning the definition of market segments, the selection of target markets, and the design of marketing programs to appeal to those markets.
- Regardless of the consumer’s level of involvement with a product category, consumers often prefer different brands because of differences in their social relationships, such as their culture, social class, reference groups, and family circumstances. Understanding how such social influences impact consumers’ decisions in a product category provides an important foundation for marketing decisions concerning the definition of market segments, the selection of target markets, and the design of marketing programs to appeal to those markets.
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2001 A McGraw-Hill Online Learning Centre