The customer, often known as the KING of the market, controls both the market and market trends. Before understanding consumer behaviour, let us first get to know this King. A consumer is a person who spends money on the products and services that a business sells. A country's supply and demand cycle heavily depend on its consumers in every economic system.
An essential component of every marketing strategy is an understanding of consumer behaviour. In reality, it's crucial to fully understand the wants and desires of the customers you wish to attract before implementing a strategy. To accomplish this, you must know how the customer will respond to and be affected by your marketing methods.
Did you know? How clients feel they are being treated accounts for 70% of the purchasing process.
What Is Consumer Behaviour in Marketing?
Consumer behaviour studies how individuals, communities, and organisations choose, acquire, utilise, and dispose of concepts, products, and services to fulfil their needs and desires. It relates to consumer behaviour in the marketplace and the root reasons for that behaviour.
Marketers anticipate identifying which products are required in the marketplace, which are old, and how to offer the commodities to consumers by knowing what drives people to purchase specific goods and services. The assumption made in the study of consumer behaviour is that customers are players in the marketplace. Role theory takes the stance that customers participate in a variety of roles in the marketplace. Consumers perform these roles in the decision-making process, beginning from the source of information, moving from the user to the payer, and finally to the disposer.
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Factors Influencing the Consumer Behaviour
Four main elements affect consumer buying behaviour:
- Cultural Factors
- Social Factors
- Personal Factors
- Psychological Factors
These characteristics influence consumers' choices of specific products and brands. Recognising these aspects' effects is crucial for developing marketing mix strategies that appeal to the intended market's preferences despite many factors being beyond the marketers' control. Cultural, social, personal, and psychological traits greatly impact consumers' buying behaviour and the ultimate purchase decision. In order to create effective marketing mixes that appeal to the intended client, marketers must have a clear understanding of the impact of these aspects.
Cultural Factors
Understanding a person's consumer behaviour depends heavily on their culture. In essence, culture is an integral component of every community and significantly influences human desires and behaviour. Marketing professionals must be very careful when assessing the cultures of various groups, regions, or even entire countries because the impact of culture on consumer behaviour differs from country to country.
It is important for a brand to understand and consider the cultural factors inherent to each market or situation to adapt its product and marketing strategy. These will play a role in consumers' perception, habits, behaviour or expectations.
- Culture
It encompasses human society, the roles that society performs, the conduct of society, and its ideals, traditions, and customs. Culture is a very complicated idea about human behaviour. Culture must be investigated since it significantly impacts how consumers behave.
- Subculture
A subculture is a collection of individuals who hold similar beliefs, practices, and values. You can categorise them as being composed of people belonging to the same country, region, religion, or racial or ethnic group.
- Social Class
Every culture has a social class; in fact, all societies have one. Knowing the social class being targeted is crucial because that social class's purchasing habits are typically relatively similar. Keep in mind that a group of consumers' social class is described by more than just their wealth.
Social Factors
Groups (reference groups, aspirational groups, and member groups), families, roles, and status are all included in this. This discusses the indirect or direct outside influences that people have on a customer's purchasing decisions. One of the aspects that has a big impact on consumer behaviour is social considerations. Reference groups, family, and societal roles and status are the three subcategories into which they fall.
- Reference groups
Reference groups have a significant possibility of influencing consumer behaviour under social factors. Of course, the effect differs for various brands and goods. There is frequently a voice of opinion in this group.
- Family
A consumer's behaviour can be influenced not just by their objectives and personalities but also by their families and relatives, who may include two or more people who live together due to a marriage or a blood relation.
- Role and status
People who are members of various clubs, organisations, or groups have roles and statuses to uphold. The positions of prestige must have an impact on how consumers behave and how much money they choose to spend.
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Personal Factors
It considers factors like age and life cycle stage, job, financial situation, way of life (including hobbies, interests, demography, and activities), personality, and sense of self. These could help to explain why our choices frequently alter as our "situation" does. Consumer traits also impact decisions and purchasing behaviour.
- Age and life cycle stage
The two most significant subfactors under personal factors are the consumer's age and his or her life cycle. The consumer’s purchasing alternatives, the reason for the purchase, and his choices to buy things change as he ages and goes through his life cycle. This stage consequently influences consumer behaviour.
- Occupation
The products and services consumers purchase are influenced by their line of work. The professions group has a higher than usual interest in using various goods and services provided by businesses. In actuality, businesses create unique items for various occupational groups.
- Financial or economic situation
With the use of money, anything can be bought or sold. If a consumer's financial status is unstable or poor, it will impact their ability to make purchases. In fact, if a nation's economy is losing ground, it will undoubtedly impact its citizens' purchasing and spending habits.
- Lifestyle
People from various cultures, subcultures, professions and even social classes have various ways of living. People's interests, views, and actions can be confirmed by their way of life. These various lifestyles influence consumer behaviour.
- Personality
Every person is unique, and they all have distinctive personalities. Their individual physiologies and personalities influence the purchases they make. Therefore, the decision to buy goods and services differs from one individual to another.
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Psychological Factors
For marketing techniques to be effective, the marketer must be aware of who is engaged in the purchasing decision and what function each person plays. The four psychological factors affecting consumer behaviour are motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.
Motivation
The act of motivating someone involves triggering their innate desires and wants. It may also be referred to as consumer requirements and goals. Consumers are stimulated and pointed in the right direction by motivation. These requirements may be psychological, security-related, social, esteem-related, or self-actualizing.
Perception
Sensing the environment and the circumstances around to make decisions in response to it is perception. Every person has a unique perspective on the world and various situations. Every person has a unique capacity for judgement, which causes them to view the world in a variety of ways. This distinguishes the capacity for making decisions.
Learning and experience
Before making a purchase decision, a consumer learns about available goods and services. Nowadays, learning and self-education are done both online and in groups. Experience is learning from the mistakes made in the past when using a product or service. Again, learning and experience significantly impact how consumers behave and make decisions about what to buy.
Attitude and beliefs
A consumer's attitude is their pleasant or unfavourable emotional state or sensation and their propensity to react to specific behaviours and activities. People's assumptions about how things should be based on what they believe the items should be. Thus, when analysing human behaviour, attitude and beliefs are also significant and must be taken into account.
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Conclusion:
We hope this blog has improved your understanding of consumer behaviour and its factors.
In order to attract customers, service providers in a market that are focused on the needs of the client need to act like psychologists. Such factors are improvable and can be addressed by paying attention to the aspects that have an impact. One strategy to succeed in the market is to understand the factors influencing consumer behaviour.
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