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The role of marketing is to meet and satisfy the needs and wants of the target audience better than the competitors. Companies need to deeply understand how consumers think, feel and act, and offer a value as clear as possible to each consumer.
For successful marketing, it is necessary for any business to fully connect with its customers. Taking a holistic marketing approach means understanding customers - gaining an overview of their daily lives as well as the changes that occur throughout their lives, so that the right products are always marketed to the right customers in the right way.
What exactly influences consumer behaviour?
Consumer behaviour is the study of how individuals, groups, and organisations buy, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and wants.
A consumer's buying behaviour is influenced by cultural, social and personal factors. Of these; cultural factors exert the most profound influence.
Cultural Factors
Culture, subculture, and social class are particularly important influences on consumer buying behaviour. Culture is what fundamentally determines a person's desires and behaviour.
Each culture consists of smaller subcultures that provide a more specific identification for its members. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions. Virtually all human societies exhibit social stratification, most often in the form of social classes, relatively homogeneous and enduring divisions in a hierarchically ordered society, whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviours.
Social Factors
In addition to cultural factors, social factors - such as reference groups, family, social roles and statuses affect our buying behaviour.
Reference groups
A person's reference groups are all groups that have a direct or indirect influence on their attitudes or behaviour. Groups that have a direct influence are called membership groups. Some of these are primary groups with which the person interacts quite frequently and informally, such as family, friends, neighbours and co-workers.
Reference groups influence members in at least three ways. They expose an individual to new behaviours and lifestyles, influence attitudes and self-concept, and create pressures for conformity that can affect product and brand choice.
An opinion leader is a person who provides informal advice or information about a product or product category and who knows the brands very well. Marketers try to reach them by identifying demographic and psychographic characteristics, identifying the information channels they use and directing messages to them.
The family
The family is the most important organisation in society, and family members constitute the most influential reference group. There are two types of families in the buyer's life.
The orientation family consists of parents and siblings. From parents, a person acquires orientation to religion, politics, and economics, and a sense of personal ambition, self-esteem, and love. Even if the buyer no longer interacts much with his parents, the latter's influence on behaviour can be significant. A more direct influence on day-to-day buying behaviour is the procreative family, i.e. the person's spouse and children.
Roles and social status
Each of us participates in many groups - family, clubs, organisations. Groups are often an important source of information and help define norms of behaviour. We can define a person's position in each group in terms of role and status.
A role consists of the activities that a person is expected to perform. Each role in turn denotes a status. People choose products that reflect and communicate their role and actual or desired status in society. Companies need to be aware of the symbol-status potential of products and brands.
Personal Factors
Personal characteristics that influence a buyer's decision include age and stage of the life cycle, occupation and economic circumstances, personality and self-concept, lifestyle and values that an individual possesses. Since many of these have a direct impact on consumer behaviour, it's important for companies to track them closely.
Age and life cycle stage
Our tastes in food, clothes, furniture and recreation are often age-related. Consumption is also shaped by the family life cycle and the number, age and gender of people in the household at any given time. Marketers should also consider critical life events or transitions - such as marriage, birth, moving, divorce, first job, career change - as factors that give rise to new needs.
Occupation and economic circumstances
Occupation influences consumption patterns. Marketers try to identify occupational groups that have an above-average interest in their products and services, and even customise products for specific occupational groups.
As the recent recession made clear, both product and brand choice are affected by economic circumstances: income, savings and assets, debt, borrowing power, and attitudes toward spending and saving.
Personality and self-concept
Each individual has personality characteristics that influence their purchasing behaviour. By personality, we mean a set of distinctive human psychological traits that lead to relatively consistent and enduring responses to environmental stimuli (including purchasing behaviour).
We often describe personality in terms of traits such as self-confidence, dominance, autonomy, respect, sociability, and adaptability. Personality can be a useful variable in analysing consumer brand choices. Brands also have personalities, and consumers are likely to choose brands whose personalities match their own.
Lifestyle and values
People of the same subculture, social class and occupation can lead different lifestyles. A lifestyle is a person's pattern in the world, expressed in activities, interests and opinions. It depicts the "whole person" interacting with the environment. Marketers look for relationships between their products and the lifestyles of individuals.
Lifestyles are driven in part by the fact that consumers are generally constrained by money or time. Companies aiming to serve cash-strapped consumers will create lower-cost products and services.
Time-constrained consumers are prone to multitasking, doing two or more things at the same time. They will also pay other people to complete tasks because time is more important to them than money. Companies that want to serve them will create products and services convenient for this group.
Consumer decisions are also influenced by core values, the belief systems that underlie attitudes and behaviours. Core values go much deeper than behaviour or attitude and determine, at a basic level, people's long-term choices and desires.
