Consumer behaviour

Consumer Behavior

Lens to explore consumer behaviour:

• Micro lens: try to understand 🡪 Sensory perceptions, Attitudes, Motivations, Decision making, Identify construction
• Meso lens: social group 🡪 Family, Social class, Tribes, Brand, Communities
• Macro lens :  culture 🡪 Myths, Globalization, Cultural, Changes, Social media

Session 1: Consumer as individual decision makers

Introduction

Exploring consumer behaviour involves understanding:

• How do consumers see the world 🡪 perception?
• How does consumer make decision 🡪 motivation?
• How the link between worldviews & consumption decisions 🡪 self

    [pic 1][pic 2][pic 3]

Components of consumers’ worldview     /    components of decision making progress

Exploring Consumer worldview

Perception

We do not perceive all add! (sensory overload)

We are not influenced by all of them

• Perception is a selective, transformative process

• 3 stages: Selection, organization, interpretation of diverse stimuli

[pic 4]

From stimuli to meanings

Focus on sensation:

The design of a product has a big impact on its success or failure

Senses help us to decide if a product is appealing or not

Especially vision 🡺 why?             E.g.: associations between colours and feelings

• Role of sensory marketing: for sound, smell, touch, taste

Focus on attention:

• Attention is the degree to which consumers focus on stimuli during the exposure
• Attention to a given stimuli depends on:

• Multitasking
• Perceptual vigilance 
• The message itself

Focus on interpretation:

•  the meaning we assign to sensory stimuli

Principles guiding interpretations:

• Gestalt: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
• Principle of closure: we see an incompletely image as a complete one
• Principle of similarity: We group together that object share the same features

Self

•  the beliefs consumers hold about their attributes, and how they evaluate them

Several components:

• Self-esteem: the idea of yourself and actual self  🡪 the idea of beauty had change
• Self-consciousness: the sensitivity to the image that we communicate to the others
• The extended self: materials object can be integrating to the construction of our identity
• The digital self

Self and multiple roles

The self is multiple and contextual: different with your family and friends: Cf symbolic interactionism

Performing different roles in the same day: focus on gender role

Motivation

• The reasons people purchase a product can vary widely
• Motivation is the process that lead people to behave as they do

• When a need is aroused that consumer want to satisfy
• We are motivated to approach a goal and seek our products helping us to reach it.

• Not always a smooth process! [pic 5]

• Underlying (sometimes competing) values often drive motivations

Understanding decision making

Learning

•  refers to a relatively permanent change in behaviour which comes with experience

• Personal experience or observation of events affecting others
• Purposive learning or incidental learning

Mental associations between products/brands, feelings and events are learnt

How do we learn and remember things?

• Behavioural theories (can’t understand what is going on in their mind): external stimulus 🡪 observable response (e.g.: repetition, positive reinforcement)
• Cognitive theories (try to understand what happened in their mind): focus on internal process (e.g.: observational learning 🡪 attention, retention in memory, skill production, relevant situation, behaviour)

Focus on memory

Products are memory makers!

• Reminding prior experiences
• Reminding the consumers’ past
• Reminding a past…: That consumers may not even know!

• Historicizing the brand: legibility to the brand

Attitude

•  a predisposition to evaluate a product/brand (set of criteria): Positive or negative or no one

3 components of attitude 🡪 not the same impact on the attitude, there is hierarchy:

• Affects: the way a consumer feels about an object
• Beliefs: what a consumer know about an object
• Behaviour: what a consumer is doing or plans to do

The formation of attitudes: traditional approach:[pic 6]

YET      🡪    Case of experiential consumption where affects come first; then actions, then beliefs

Attitudes are consistent: Consumers value harmony between their thoughts, feelings and behaviours[pic 7]

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