What constitutes the market? Occupant What does the market buy? Objects Why does the market buy? Objectives Who participates in the buying? Organisations How does the market buy? Operations When does the market buy? Occasions Where does the market buy? Outlets

1. Buying behavior
Analyzing Consumer Markets
and Buyer Behavior
Module 4

2. Buying behavior
Key questions for marketers today
 What constitutes the market? Occupant
 What does the market buy? Objects
 Why does the market buy? Objectives
 Who participates in the buying? Organisations
 How does the market buy? Operations
 When does the market buy? Occasions
 Where does the market buy? Outlets

3. Buying behavior
Major factors influencing buying behavior
1. Cultural factors
2. Social factors
3. Personal factors
4. Psychological factors

4. Buying behavior
1. Cultural factors - Culture
 Culture plays the broadest and deepest
influence in consumer behavior
 A growing child acquires a set of values,
perceptions, preferences, and behaviors
through his or her family and other key
institutions

5. Buying behavior
1. Cultural factors - Subculture
 Smaller sub cultures provide more
specific identification and socialization
for its members
 These include nationalities, religions,
racial groups and geographical regions
 These influence our food preferences,
clothing choices, recreation and career
aspirations

6. Buying behavior
1. Cultural factors - Social Class
 Stratification in the form of caste system based on roles that
cannot be changed
 More recent phenomena is social classes – relatively
homogeneous and enduring divisions in a society which are
hierarchically ordered and whose members share similar values,
interests and behavior
 Persons within a social class tend to behave more alike than
persons from two different social classes
 Persons are perceived as occupying inferior or superior positions
according to their social class
 A persons social class is indicated by a number of variables such
as occupation, income, wealth, education and value orientation
 People can move from one class to another
 Social classes show distinct product and brand preferences in
areas such as clothing, home furnishing, leisure and
automobiles

7. Buying behavior
2. Social factors – Reference groups
 Our reference group consists of all the groups that have a direct
(face-to-face) or indirect influence on the person’s attitudes or
behavior
 Groups that have a direct influence are call membership groups.
These are groups to which a person belongs or interacts
 Primary groups – family, friends, neighbours and coworkers with
whom we interact continuously. Informal
 Secondary group – religious, professional, and trade union
groups. Formal, less interaction
 Groups we would like to belong to are aspirational groups
 Reference groups expose the individual to new behaviors and
lifestyles. Also influence the person’s attitudes and self-concept
because we may normally desire to ‘fit-in’. They also create
pressures to conformity that may effect the persons actual
product and brand choices
 There are opinion leaders in reference groups. Marketers should
reach out to them

8. Buying behavior
2. Social factors - Family
 Most influential primary reference group
 Family of orientation consists of one’s parents. From parents we
acquire an orientation towards religion, politics, economics and
a sense of personal ambition, self worth, and love
 A more direct influence on everyday buying behavior is one’s
family of procreation, one’s spouse and children
 The wife has traditionally acted as the family’s main purchasing
agent, especially for food, sundries and staple clothing items
 In case of expensive products and services, husbands and wives
engage in more joint decision making
 Husband dominant – life insurance, automobiles, television
Wife dominant – washing machine, carpeting, furniture and
kitchenware
Equal – Vacation, housing and outside entertainment

9. Buying behavior
2. Social factors – roles and statuses
 Family, clubs and organisations. The
person’s position in each group is
defined in terms of role and status
 Status symbol vary for social classes
and also geographically

10. Buying behavior
3. Personal Factors – Age and Life-Cycle Stage
 Changes in consumption of food, taste
in clothes, furniture and recreation over
lifetime
 Stages in family life-cycle

11. Buying behavior
3. Personal factors - Occupation
 Blue collar/Company CEO’s etc.
 Company’s can specialize in products
for certain occupational groups e.g.
software companies design different
computer software for brand managers,
engineers, lawyers and physicians

12. Buying behavior
3. Personal factors – Economic circumstances
 Economic circumstances consist of spend able
income (its level, stability and time pattern),
savings and assets (including the percentage
that is liquid), debts, borrowing power and
attitude towards spending and saving
 If economic indicators point towards
recession, marketers can take steps to
redesign, reposition and reprice their
products so they can continue to offer value
to target customers

13. Buying behavior
3. Personal factors - Lifestyles
 Belonging vs. achiever
 Lifestyle is the person’s pattern of living in the
world as expressed in the person’s activities,
interests and opinion
 Lifestyle portrays the ‘whole person’
interacting with his or her environment
 British lifestyles: Avant-Gardians (interested
in change), Pontificators (traditionalists, very
British), Chameleons (follow the crowd) and
Sleepwalkers (contented underachievers)

14. Buying behavior
3. Personal factors – personality and self-concept
 Personality – person’s distinguishing
psychological characteristics that lead to
relatively consistent and enduring responses
to his or her environment
 Personality is defined by such traits as self-
confidence, dominance, autonomy, deference,
sociability, defensiveness and adaptability
 This can only be useful if strong correlation
exists between certain personality types and
product or brand choices

15. Buying behavior
4. Psychological factors - Motivation
 Biogenic needs arise from physiological states of tension
such as hunger, thirst, discomfort. Psychogenic arise from
psychological states of tension such as the need for
recognition, esteem or belonging
 Freud’s Theory of Motivation – assumes that the real
psychological forces shaping people’s behavior are largely
unconscious
 Maslow’s Theory of Motivation – explains why people are
driven by particular needs at particular times. Physiological
needs, safety needs, social needs, social needs and self-
actualization needs
 Herzberg’s Theory of Motivation – “two-factor theory” of
motivation which distinguishes dissatisfiers and satisfiers

16. Buying behavior
4. Psychological factors - Perception
 How the motivated person actually acts is influenced
by his or her perception of the situation
 We apprehend a stimulus object through sensations
that flow through five senses: sight, hearing, smell,
touch and taste however each of us attends,
organizes and interprets these sensory data in an
individual way.
 Perception is defined as “the process by which an
individual selects, organizes and interprets
information inputs to create meaningful picture of the
world”
 Perception depends not only on the physical stimuli
but also on the stimuli’s relation to the surrounding
field and on conditions within the individual

17. Buying behavior
4. Psychological factors -Learning
 When people act they learn. Learning
describes changes in an individuals
behavior arising from experience
 Most human behavior is learnt
 Learning is produced through the
interplay of drives, stimuli, cues,
responses and reinforcement

18. Buying behavior
4. Psychological factors – Beliefs and Attitudes
 A belief is a descriptive thought that a person holds
about something
 These beliefs make up product and brand images and
people act on their images
 What happens when beliefs are negative?
 Attitude describes a person’s enduring favorable or
unfavorable cognitive evaluations, emotional feelings
and action tendencies towards some object or idea
 Attitudes put people into a frame of mind of liking or
disliking an object, moving towards or away from it
 Attitudes lead people to behave in a fairly consistent
manner. It economizes energy and thought. Are very
difficult to change