Consumer Behavior: Meeting Changes and Challenges LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter students should be able: 1. To understand what consumer behavior is and the different types of consumers. 2. To understand the relationship between consumer behavior and the marketing concept, the societal marketing concept, as well as segmentation, targeting, and positioning. 3. To understand the relationship between consumer behavior and customer value, satisfaction, trust and retention. 4. To understand how new technologies are enabling marketers to better satisfy the needs and wants of consumers.
To understand how marketers are increasingly able to reach consumers wherever consumers wish to be reached. 6. To understand how the world’s economic condition is leading to consumption instability and change. 7. To understand the makeup and composition of a model of consumer behavior. 8. To understand the structure of this book. CHAPTER SUMMARY The study of consumer behavior enables marketers to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace; it is concerned not only with what consumers buy but also with why, when, where, and how they buy it.
Consumer research is the methodology used to study consumer behavior; it takes place at every phase of the consumption process: before the purchase, during the purchase, and after the purchase. The field of consumer behavior is rooted in the marketing concept, a business orientation that evolved in the 1950s through several alternative approaches, referred to, respectively, as the production concept, the product concept, and the selling concept. The three major strategic tools of marketing are market segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
The marketing mix consists of a company’s service and/or product offerings to consumers and the pricing, promotion, and distribution methods needed to accomplish the exchange. Consumer behavior is interdisciplinary; that is, it is based on concepts and theories about people that have been developed by scientists in such diverse disciplines as psychology, sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and economics. Skilled marketers make the customer the core of the company’s organizational culture and ensure that all employees view any exchange with a customer as part of a customer relationship, not as a transaction.
The three drivers of successful relationships between marketers and customers are customer value, high levels of customer satisfaction, and building a structure for customer retention. Digital technologies allow much greater customization of products, services, and promotional messages than do older marketing tools. They enable marketers to adapt the elements of the marketing mix to consumers’ needs more quickly and efficiently, and to build and maintain relationships with customers on a much greater scale. However, these technologies also represent significant challenges to marketers and to business models that have been used for decades.
Consumer behavior has become an integral part of strategic market planning. The belief that ethics and social responsibility should also be integral components of every marketing decision is embodied in a revised marketing concept—the societal marketing concept—that calls on marketers to fulfill the needs of their target markets in ways that improve society as a whole. CHAPTER OUTLINE INTRODUCTION 1. Consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs.
The sales orientation focus was to sell more of what the manufacturing department was able to produce. a) The orientation shifted from producing to selling. b) At some point, supply increasingly reached a point where it was greater than demand. c) The sales orientation began in the 1930s and extended to the 1950s. 4. In the mid-1950’s there was a shift from the sales orientation to the marketing orientation. a) Businesses realized the importance of focusing on consumers and their preferences. What Is The Marketing Concept *****Use Key Term marketing concept Here; Use Discussion Question #1 Here***** 1.
The field of consumer behavior is rooted in a marketing strategy that evolved in the late 1950s. 2. Companies determined, that in order to be successful, they must determine the needs and wants of specific target markets and deliver the desired satisfactions better than the competition. 3. Instead of trying to persuade customers to buy what the firm had already produced, marketing-oriented firms found that it was a lot easier to produce only products they had first confirmed, through research, that consumers wanted. 4. Recently there has been an important modification to the marketing concept called the societal marketing concept.
The concept suggests that consumers may respond to their immediate needs or wants, while overlooking what is in their own long-run best interest, or the best interest of their family and neighbors, the best interest of their country or region or the entire planet. b) Enlightened marketers take it upon themselves to remind consumers as to what is in the consumer’s long-run best interest; at the same time they set out what their own company is doing in order to be a good corporate citizen. *****Use Key Term societal marketing concept Here; Use Exercise #2 Here***** Embracing the Marketing Concept 1.
It is often important for companies to continuously conduct marketing research studies to monitor consumers’ needs and preferences with respect to the products and services that they currently market and what they might develop in the future. 2. They discovered that consumers were highly complex individuals, subject to a variety of psychological and social needs quite apart from their basic functional needs. a) The needs and priorities of different consumer segments differed dramatically. b) The objectives of a company should be to target different products and services to different market segments in order to better satisfy different needs.
In order to design new products and marketing strategies that would fulfill consumer needs, they had to study consumers and their consumption behavior in depth. 3. The term consumer research represents the process and tools used to study consumer behavior. *****Use Key Term consumer research Here; Use Exercise #3 Here***** Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning 1. The focus of the marketing concept is to know consumers current needs, and to secure, a picture of their likely future needs. 2.
Market and consumer researchers seek to identify the many similarities and differences that exist among the peoples of the world. 3. The marketer must adapt the image of its product so that each market segment perceives the product as better fulfilling its specific needs than competitive products. a) The three elements of this strategic framework are: market segmentation, targeting, and positioning. 4. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into subsets of consumers with common needs or characteristics. 5. Market targeting is the selection of one or more of the segments identified for the company to pursue. 6. Positioning refers to the development of a distinct image for the product or service in the mind of the consumer, an image that will differentiate the offering from competing ones and faithfully communicate to the target audience that the particular product or service will fulfill their needs better than competing brands. a) Successful positioning centers around two key principles: i)The first principle says that the marketer should communicate the benefits that the product will provide rather than the product’s features.