Consumer Behaviour: Buying Process and Influencing Factors

Consumer Buyer Behaviour

The purchasing habits of the end clientele, or the people and households who make purchases for their own use. A final consumer market is created by the combination of all these different markets. Age, income, education level, and taste all affect consumers' purchase patterns.

Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behaviour

Numerous elements like cultural, societal, personal, and psychological traits have a significant impact on consumers. 

• Cultural factors: Numerous elements like cultural, societal, personal, and psychological traits have a significant impact on consumers.

  • Culture: The fundamental beliefs, desires, and behaviors that each member of society learns from their families and other significant institutions make up their culture. Every group or society has a culture, and different cultures have different influences in different nations.
  • Subculture: Each culture has smaller groupings known as subcultures, whose values are built on shared events and circumstances. Nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic areas all have their own subcultures.
  • Social class: The community's formal divisions that last forever and are composed of people with similar interests, values, and habits. It is determined by a variety of characteristics, including occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables, rather than by a single element like income.

• Social factors: Social elements including customer small groups, families, and social roles and status can also affect a consumer's behavior.

  • Groups and social networks: Different kinds of small groups have an impact on a person's conduct. A group is any two or more individuals working together to accomplish either one another's or their own goals.
  • Family: The family is another element that affects consumer behavior. The family is the most significant group of consumers in society, and this has been amply demonstrated via research. The roles and sway that the husband, wife, and kids have while choosing between various goods and services are of importance to marketers.
  • Roles and Status: A person can be classified in terms of both role and status in each of the numerous groups to which they belong, including families, clubs, and organizations.

• Personal factors: A buyer's choice is also influenced by their own personal traits, such as their age and life cycle stage, occupation, financial status, way of life, personality, and sense of self.

  • Age and life cycle stage: Throughout their lives, people modify the goods and services they purchase. Age mostly influences tastes in food, clothing, furnishings, and leisure activities. When creating appropriate products and marketing strategies for each age group, marketers frequently define their target audiences in terms of life cycle stages.
  • Occupation: The items and services that people buy are influenced by their line of work. Marketers look for professional organizations with greater-than-average interest in their goods and services.
  • Economic Situation: The person's financial position will influence the product selection. By setting prices overly high, marketers target wealthy customers.
  • Lifestyle: Lifestyle refers to a person's way of life, including their interests, activities, and attitudes. Understanding consumer values and how they impact buying behavior is made easier with the aid of the lifestyle idea.
  • Personality and self-concept: The unique personalities of each person have an impact on their purchasing choices. Personality is the distinctive traits that people exhibit in various contexts.

• Psychological factors: The four main psychological elements that influence consumer purchasing, such as motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes, are discussed here.

  • Motivation: A need that propels people toward satisfaction is called a motive. When the most important need has been met, it ceases to serve as a motivator, and the next most important need is the one that is attempted to be met.
  • Perception: Perception is the method by which individuals choose, arrange, and interpret information to produce meaningful information. Similar inputs are perceived differently by various people. While some consumers worry that they may be unknowingly impacted by marketing messages, marketers worry about whether their offers will even be perceived by potential customers.
  • Learning: Learning occurs when people alter their behavior as a result of experience. Drives, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement all play a role in it.
  • Belief and attitudes: While attitudes define a person's perception, feelings, and dispositions toward an object or idea, beliefs are a description of what a person believes to be true. Instead than trying to influence people's opinions, a business should often try to fit its products within those attitudes.

Types of Buying Decision Behaviour

Consumers exhibit four distinct forms of purchasing behavior, which are detailed below:

• Complex Buying Behaviour: Complex purchasing behavior refers to high levels of participation in a purchase and the perception of appreciable brand distinctions. Customers will be very engaged if the product is pricey, hazardous, rarely bought, and highly indicative of the consumer's identity. The user might not be aware of characteristics like "4GB dual channel" or "DDR2 DRAM memory," for instance.
• Dissonance – Reducing Buying Behaviour: Consumer Dissonance: Decreased Purchasing When people shop, their involvement is great yet there are little discernible variations across brands. It happens when customers make an expensive, unusual, or risky purchase yet see few variations between the brands. For instance, buyers may experience high interest while purchasing furniture because it is expensive, but they do so quickly and without considering the brands.
• Habitual Buying Behaviour: It is a purchasing strategy used by consumers when there is little customer interaction and little room for discernible brand differences. Take behaviorsalt, for instance. The consumer doesn't actively participate in this product category; they only go to the store and purchase any off-brand.
• Variety –Seeking Buying Behaviour: It is a consumer behavior in situations characterised by low consumer involvement but significant brand differences. In such cases consumers do a lot of brand switching . For example, when buying biscuits , a consumer hold some beliefs and choose any biscuits and evaluate it during the consumption.

The Buyer Decision Process

We now need to understand the buyer's decision-making process and how consumers make purchases. The decision-making process for buyers involves five steps.

• Need Recognition: The buyer must first recognize a need or problem in order to begin the purchasing process. Consider having a conversation with a buddy about the quality of the water you drink. Marketers are aware of the consumer's desire for a specific product at this point.
• Information Search: the phase of the purchasing process where the customer looks for information about the product. A consumer may or may not look up information since they will be willing to spend if they receive a pleasing product.
• Evaluation of Alternatives: the process by which a consumer uses information to evaluate brands in a selection. In addition to math and reasoning, consumers also consider the pros and cons of various options. Other instances, the client does little to no evaluation.
• Purchase Decision: The decision to acquire a product from a certain brand is made by the consumer. Two factors, namely other people's attitudes and unanticipated situational factors, might occasionally have an impact on a buyer's decision. If someone important to you believes you must get the inexpensive item, here is an illustration of how others may feel. Unexpected situational considerations, such as the state of the economy, can make it difficult for you to purchase a car even if its price is reduced.
• Postpurchase Behaviour: the phase of the purchasing process where customers decide what to do next after making a purchase based on their happiness or discontent. Customers may not be satisfied if there is a large difference between expectations and performance, and vice versa.

Reference

Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2013). Principles of Marketing. Chennai: Pearson India Education Services Pvt Ltd.