Financing and Marketing Management

Unit 14 - Marketing Environment-Consumer Behaviour

14.6. Personal factors
A buyer’s decisions are also influenced by personal characteristics, notably the buyer’s age and life-cycle stage, occupation, economic circumstances, lifestyle and personality and self-concept.
Age and Life-Cycle Stage
People buy different goods and services over their lifetime. They eat baby food in the early years, most foods in the growing and mature years, and special diets in the later years. People’s taste in clothes, furniture and recreation is also age related.
Consumption is also shaped by the stage of the family life cycle. Nine stages of the family life cycle are listed in Table 1, along with the financial situation and typical product interests of each group. Marketers often choose life-cycle groups as target market.
Adults experience certain passages or transformations as they go through life. Thus Margaret may move from being a satisfied brand manager and wife to being a dissatisfied person searching for a new career. This search may have stimulated her interest in computers. Marketers should pay attention to changing life circumstances-divorce, widowhood, remarriage-and their effect on consumption behaviour.

Occupation
A person’s consumption pattern is also influenced by his or her occupation. A blue-collar worker will buy work clothes, work shoes, lunch boxes and bowling recreation. A company president will buy expensive suits, air travel, country club membership and a large sailboat. Marketers try to identify the occupational groups that have above-average interest in their products and services. A company can even specialize their products for certain occupational groups. Thus computer software companies will design different computer software for brand managers, engineers, lawyers and physicians.
Economic Circumstances
Product choice is greatly affected by one’s economic circumstances. People’s economic circumstances consist of their spendable income (its level, stability and time pattern), savings and assets (including the percentage that is liquid), borrowing power and attitude toward spending versus saving. Thus Margaret can consider buying a personal computer if she has enough spendable income, savings or borrowing power and prefers spending to saving. Marketers of income-sensitive goods pay constant attention to trends in personal income, savings and interest rates. If economic indicators point to a recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition and reprice their products so they continue to appeal to target customers.
Lifestyle
People coming from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may lead quite different lifestyles. Margaret, for example, can choose to live a ”belonging” lifestyle, which is reflected in wearing conservative clothes, spending a lot of time with her family, helping her church. Or she can choose an “achiever” lifestyle, marked by working long hours on major projects and playing hard when it comes to travel and sports.
A person’s lifestyle is the person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in the person’s activities, interests and opinions. Lifestyle portrays the”whole person” interacting with his or her environment. Lifestyle reflects something beyond the person’s social class, on the one hand, or personality, on the other. If we know someone’s social class, we can infer several things about the person’s likely behaviour but fail to see the person as an individual. If we know someone’s personality, we can infer distinguishing psychological characteristics but not much about actual activities, interests and opinions.
Personality and Self-Concept
Each person has a distinct personality that will influence his or her buying behaviour. By personality, we mean the person’s distinguishing psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and enduring responses to his or her environment. Personality is usually described in terms of such traits as self-confidence, dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness and adaptability. Personality can be a useful variable in analyzing consumer behaviour provided that personality types can be classified and that strong correlations exist between certain personality types and product or brand choices.
Many marketers use a concept related to personality-a person’s self-concept (or self image). All of us carry a complex mental picture of ourselves. For example Margaret may see herself as highly accomplished and deserving the best. To that extent, she will favor a computer that projects the same qualities. If the IBM personal computer is promoted as a computer for those who want the best, then its brand image will matter her self-image. Marketers should try to develop brand images that match the self-image of the target market.
Psychological Factors
A person’s buying choices are also influenced by four major psychological factors-motivation, perception, learning and beliefs and attitudes.
Motivation
We saw that Margaret became interested in buying a computer. Why? What is she really seeking? What needs is she trying to satisfy?
A person may have many needs at any given time. Some needs are biogenic. They arise from physiological states of tension such as hunger, thirst, discomfort. Other needs are psychogenic. They arise from psychological states of tension such as the need for recognition, esteem or belonging. Most psychogenic needs are not intense enough to motivate the person to act on them immediately. A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity. A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to drive the person to act.
Psychologists have developed theories of human motivation. Three of the best known-the theories of Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg-carry quite different implications for consumer analysis and marketing strategy.
Perception
A motivated person is ready to act. How the motivated person actually acts is illustrated by his or her perception of the situation. Two people in the same motivated state and objective situation may act quite differently because they perceive the situation differently. Margaret may see a fast-talking computer salesperson as aggressive and insecure. Another shopper might see the same salesperson as intelligent and helpful.
People can emerge with different perceptions of the same object because of three perceptual processes: selective attention, selective distortion and selective retention.