Personal Factors

Personal Factors

Age and Life-Cycle Stage. People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetimes.
Tastes in food, clothes, furniture, and recreation are often age-related. Buying is also shaped by the stage of the family life cycle. Marketers often define their targets in terms of life-cycle stage and develop appropriate products and marketing plans for each stage.
Occupation: A person’s occupation affects the goods and services they purchase.
Economic Situation: A person’s economic situation will affect store and product choice.
Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her psychographics. This involves measuring major AIO dimensions such as activities (work, hobbies, shopping, sports, social events), interests (food, fashion, family, recreation), and opinions (about themselves, social issues, business, products).

Personality and Self-Concept
Personality refers to the unique psychological character¬istics that distinguish a person or group.
A brand personality is the specific mix of human traits that may be attributed to a particular brand. One researcher identified five brand personality traits:
1.Sincerity (down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful)
2.Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, and up-to-date)
3.Competence (reliable, intelligent, and successful)
4.Sophistication (upper class and charming)
5.Ruggedness (outdoorsy and tough)
The basic self-concept premise is that people’s possessions contribute to and reflect their identities; that is, “we are what we have.”
Psychological Factors
Motivation: A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested that a person’s buying decisions are affected by subconscious motives that even the buyer may not fully understand.
Motivation research refers to qualitative research designed to probe consumers’ hidden, subconscious motivations. Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by particular needs at particular times. He determined that human needs are arranged in a hierarchal fashion.

Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world. Selective attention is the tendency for people to screen out most of the information to which they are exposed. Selective distortion describes the tendency of people to interpret information in a way that will support what they already believe.  Selective retention is the retaining of information that supports their attitudes and beliefs.
Subliminal advertising refers to marketing messages received without consumers knowing it. Studies have established no link between subliminal messages and consumer behavior.

Learning describes changes in an individual’s behavior arising from experience. A drive is a strong internal stimulus that calls for action. A drive becomes a motive when it is directed toward a particular stimulus object. Cues are minor stimuli that determine when, where, and how the person responds.

Beliefs and Attitudes: A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something. Attitude describes a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or idea. Attitudes are difficult to change.

Types of Buying Decision Behavior
1. Complex Buying Behavior: Consumers undertake complex buying behavior when they are highly involved in a purchase and perceive significant differences among brands.Consumers may be highly involved when the product is expensive, risky, purchased infrequently, and highly self-expressive. Typically, the consumer has much to learn about the product category.Marketers of high-involvement products must understand the information-gathering and evaluation behavior of high-involvement consumers.
2. Dissonance-Reducing Buying Behavior: Dissonance-reducing buying behavior occurs when consumers are highly involved with an expensive, infrequent, or risky purchase, but see little difference among brands. After the purchase, consumers might experience postpurchase dissonance (after-sale discomfort) when they notice certain disadvantages of the purchased brand or hear favorable things about brands not purchased. To counter such dissonance, the marketer’s after-sale communications should provide evidence and support to help consumers feel good about their brand choices.
3. Habitual Buying Behavior: Habitual buying behavior occurs under conditions of low consumer involvement and little significant brand difference. Consumer behavior does not pass through the usual belief-attitude-behavior sequence. Consumers do not search extensively for information about the brands, evaluate brand characteristics, and make weighty decisions about which brands to buy. They passively receive information as they watch television or read magazines. Because buyers are not highly committed to any brands, marketers of low-involvement products with few brand differences often use price and sales promotions to stimulate buying.
4. Variety-Seeking Buying Behavior: Consumers undertake variety-seeking buying behavior in situations characterized by low consumer involvement but significant perceived brand differences. In such cases, consumers often do a lot of brand switching.