LN 04: CONSUMER MARKETS AND CONSUMER BUYER BEHAVIOR

LN 04: CONSUMER MARKETS AND CONSUMER BUYER BEHAVIOR

Consumer buyer behavior refers to the buying behavior of final consumers—individuals and households who buy goods and services for personal consumption. All of these consumers combine to make up the consumer market. The Sri Lankan consumer market consists of more than 22 million people.

Model of Consumer Behavior

The central question for marketers is: How do consumers respond to various marketing efforts the company might use?
Marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place, promotion. Other stimuli include major forces and events in the buyer’s environment: economic, technological, social, and cultural. The marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses inside the consumer’s “black box,” which has two parts.
1.The buyer’s characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli.
2.The buyer’s decision process itself affects the buyer’s behavior.

Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behavior
Cultural Factors: Culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior. Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts.
Subcultures are groups of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations.
Social classes are society’s relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviors. Social class is not determined by a single factor, but is measured as a combination of occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables.

Social Factors
Groups and Social Networks: A person’s behavior is influenced by many small groups. Marketers use word-of-mouth influence and buzz marketing to spread the word about their brands. Opinion leaders are people within a reference group who, because of special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exert social influence on others.
Online social networks are online communities where people socialize or exchange information and opinions.
Family is the most important consumer buying organization in society.
Roles and Status: A role consists of the activities people are expected to perform. Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society.