Financing and Marketing Management

14.2. A Model of Consumer Behaviour

Unit 14 - Marketing Environment-Consumer Behavior

14.2. A Model of Consumer Behavior
In earlier times, marketers could understand consumers through the daily experience of selling to them. But the growth in the size of firms and markets has removed many marketing decision makers from direct contact with customers. Increasingly, managers have had to turn to consumer research for answers to the most important questions about any market, called the seven O’s of the marketplace.
Who constitutes the market?  Occupants
What does the market buy? Objects
Why does the market buy? Objectives
Who participates in the buying? Organizations
How does the market buy? Operations
When does the market buy? Occasions
Where does the market buy? Outlets
Of central interest is this question, How do consumers respond to various marketer-controlled stimuli? The company that understands how consumers will respond to different product features, prices, advertising appeals, and so on will have an enormous advantage over its competitors. Therefore, business and academic marketing researches have invested much energy in researching the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer response.
Their starting point is the stimulus-response model shown in fig 8. This figure shows marketing and other stimuli entering the buyer’s “black box” and producing the buyer’s responses. The stimuli on the left are of two types. Marketing stimuli consist of the Four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. Environmental stimuli consist of major forces and events in the buyer’s macro environment: economic, technological, political and cultural. All these stimuli pass through the buyer’s black box and produce the buyer’s purchase decisions shown on the right: produce choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing and purchase amount.
The marketer’s task is to understand what happens in the buyer’s black box between outside stimuli and the buyer’s purchase decisions. We will address two questions

• How does the buyer’s background-cultural, social, personal and psychological-influence the buyer’s buying behaviour?
• How does the buyer move through a decision process to make purchasing choices?