Understanding Consumer Behavior: A Guide for Marketers
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Overview
In the whims and caprice of communication, communication is not complete until feedback is ensured. In the same vein, marketing processes are not complete until the consumers have patronized the products or services being offered by the producer which was communicated by the marketers.
Having an apt understanding of consumer behavior is very paramount in creating strategic marketing plans that is active and which makes available products and services to quench the thirst of the consumers’ needs and wants. It is of high importance for marketers to possess a versatile knowledge on how to analyze and grasp data that pertains to consumer behavior in order to comprehend the patterns and trends, to be able to predict demand for the sole aim of taking the right steps concerning product / services promotion, the price, the product design, supply, etc.
Companies and business organizations spend much time, resources and efforts on their product/service. Then, it is significantly important that their investments meet with the needs of their target audience in order not to run into losses. By comprehending your consumer’s needs, wants, and the line of thought in decision-making, it will become easy to draft marketing communications and offerings that synchronize with them on a reasonable level. This then calls for higher commitments and conversion rates, as there could be tendencies for customers to pay attention to the message and act upon campaigns that relates to their lives. Consumer behavior helps to categorize your target audience into different groups which enables you to identify their needs, stay ahead of the market trends, and to provide distinctive customer service, etc.
Understanding how consumers behave allows marketers to know the buying motive which assists them to come up with proficient marketing campaigns, take the right steps and transform the competitive advantage in the market into gains.
Meaning of Consumer behavior
Consumer behavior can be defined as the decisions that the target audience make when they choose, buy, use, or dump of a product or service. Consumer behavior has to do with psychological, sociological, and cultural factors in responding to the marketers’ marketing messages.
Furthermore, Consumer behavior is the study of how individual customers, companies and organizations make decisions to purchase, to use, or neglect of products, services, views, and perspectives. It is an elaborate concept that houses the factors that make the target audience make their choices in the marketing spheres.
Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior
Psychological Factors
Human beings are rational beings who always have reasons for whatever action they want to take. This is where psychological factor comes to play to serve as a major determinant of consumer behavior. Meanwhile, psychological factors are immeasurable but are so persuasive enough to influence the customers to make a buying decision. The psychological factor include;
Motivation: When someone is well motivated about a marketing campaign, it will drive the person to want to purchase those particular goods and services being advertised.
Perception: Customers’ view about life situations also contribute largely to the way they purchase market items. It involves the process of interpreting, gathering and analyzing information about a product or service in order to create a reputable image about a particular product through promotions, customer review, advertisement, social media feedback, etc.
Learning: Every product comes with the tendency of educating the target audience on the benefits it offers and how to use it properly. In this scenario, learning could either be cognitive whereby a customer applies his knowledge to discover satisfaction and a solution from the product he purchases or conditional whereby individual customer is opened up to a situation frequently.
Attitudes and Beliefs: Attitudes and beliefs influence the buying decisions of the customers; customers behave in a special way pertaining a product based on attitude. Attitude and beliefs are crucial to define the image of a product. Therefore, marketers work relentlessly to comprehend the attitude of a customer to draft their marketing campaigns.
Social Factors
Imitation is in the blood of humanity because of their social status. Many people buy some stuffs not necessarily because they needed them but to proof that they also belong to social class in the society. The power of imitation has the capacity to influence their buying motive. The features of the social factors include;
Family relationship: Family is the first institution of every child; it is the place where a child first learns how to take decisions about life. Research therefore makes it known that a child can be by the buying behavior of the family he belongs to which later contribute to his personal buying attitude when it is time to make purchases.
Reference Groups: Reference group is a collection of people you share things in common with either, and this group of people have the influential power over your buying behavior.
Societal status: People are easily influenced to buy some things because of their social statuses and the title they hold onto in the society. The buying behavior of a wealthy man cannot be compared to the buying behavior of an average man of average financial income.
Cultural factors: Culture is a total way of life; the buying decision of a consumer is largely dependent on the cultural environment a man was raised. For instance, the way a learned person will buy different from the way an illiterate will buy, etc. The key features of the cultural factors include; Culture, Subculture, Social Class etc.
Personal Factors
Reasons that are peculiar to the customers affects their purchasing behavior. These personal reasons are different from person to person which produces different perceptive towards consumer behavior. The key features of personal factors are as follows; Age, income occupation, and lifestyle.
Economic Factors
The state of the economic and the state of the market situation of a country is another factor that greatly affects the consumer buying habits. When there is money in circulation in a country the purchasing power tends to be on the high side. consumers. Positive economic environment boosts consumer’s confidence to spend on buying products meanwhile, a weak economy depicts a crawling market which is portrayed by lack of employment which calls for lower purchasing behavior. The key features of economic factor involve; Personal Income, Family Income, Consumer Credit, Liquid Assets, Savings, etc.
Get Started
Call-to-action to contact for a consultation
Tel: (+234) 802 320 0801, (+234) 807 576 5799)
E-Mail: info@qeeva.com
Office Address: 5, Ishola Bello Close, Off Iyalla Street, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria.
The Consumer Decision-Making Process
Consumer decision-making process is defined as a model that spells out the different level consumers undergo before considering and concluding to patronize a product or service. Comprehending these procedures is paramount for marketers because it enables them to gravitate their strategies to synchronize with the consumers at each level. The breakdown goes thus;
Identification of Problems: By this act, the customer willingly identifies the problems inform of needs and want that are lacking. Identifying these problems could be happen by internal factors or external factors.
Information for solution: Consumers are always seeking information as regards adequate solutions to their problems probably through past encounter with the product or service, brand knowledge, web surfing, reading reviews, communicating with friends or family, etc.
Weighing alternatives: There numerous brands and products, consumers therefore find it necessary to checkmate different options available and weighs their merits and demerits before committing themselves to patronizing the concluded brand and product of their choice.
Buying Decision: Consumers go for the product or service that best suits their needs and wants. However, this decision could be determined by various factors which include pricing, brand image, perceived value to get, and ease of purchase.
- Satisfaction Evaluation: The consumer usually weighs the satisfaction they derive after they have purchased a certain product. This level is important grooming brand loyalty through positive experiences which can lead to constant patronization and positive verbal evangelism marketing.
The difficulty of the decision-making procedures can alternate based on the product or service review. For daily patronage like food stuffs, the procedures might be faster and less involved, while for high-involvement patronages such as cars or houses, the procedure might be complicated.
Consumers are not one way traffic in nature they can only revisit the aforementioned level of the process, especially if they come in contact new information or have a change of needs.
Having a broad knowledge concerning consumer decision-making process can make marketers develop strategies for each level. They can compose informational messages to address search needs, to highlight the characteristics of a product at the evaluation level. Focusing on customer satisfaction can encourage positive after-purchase evaluations and create solid customer relationships.
Marketing Tools for Understanding Consumer Behavior
Market Research: Market research is defined as a systematic procedure for gathering, evaluating, and interpreting information about a target market. Market research is the backbone of any thriving business strategy, making available potential insights that inform product growth, marketing campaigns, and business decisions.
Website Analytics: Website analytics assists businesses to gain an insightful understanding of their virtual audience and maximizes their websites to ascertain their ambitions. This then leads to speedy website traffic, improved gains rates, and rapid business development. Note that website analytics is an ongoing process that involves monitoring and analyzing your data regularly in a bid to unveil trends, quantify progress, and come up with data-driven decisions to grow the activity of website continually.
Social Media Listening: Social media listening deals with the practice of monitoring and analyzing digital feedbacks about your brand, your industry, and your competitors. It is about proficiently searching for identification of keywords across social media spaces such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Etc.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data: Customer Relationship Management data is the oxygen of all customer-driven business. It has a vast means of gathering information about a brand’s interactions with their prospective, potential and existing customer. This data is stored, retrieved and managed within a customer relationship management system, a software application that helps business organizations section customer relationships and interactions.
Get Started
Call-to-action to contact for a consultation
Tel: (+234) 802 320 0801, (+234) 807 576 5799)
E-Mail: info@qeeva.com
Office Address: 5, Ishola Bello Close, Off Iyalla Street, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria.
Action Plan
Develop Buyer Personas: Buyer personas which is also known as marketing personas, are diagrammatical representations of your ideal customers. They involve market research, customer data, and insights to create an extensive profile that encapsulates the demography, behavior, needs, motivations, and goals of your customers.
A/B Testing: A/B testing, which is also known split testing and bucket testing, is the backbone of optimizing the user experience and conversion rates for websites and platforms. It is a controlled experiment whereby you compare and contrast two or more segments of a variable such as the webpage, design layout, or marketing campaign message to know the one that performs better for an actual aim.
Conclusion
Having a compendium understanding of consumer behavior is very essential in creating strategic marketing plans that is active and which makes available products and services to quench the thirst of the consumers’ needs and wants. It is of high importance for marketers to possess a versatile knowledge on how to analyze and grasp data that pertains to consumer behavior in order to comprehend the patterns and trends, to be able to predict demand for the sole aim of taking the right steps concerning product / services promotion, the price, and the product design.
Get Started
Call-to-action to contact for a consultation
Tel: (+234) 802 320 0801, (+234) 807 576 5799)
E-Mail: info@qeeva.com
Office Address: 5, Ishola Bello Close, Off Iyalla Street, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria.
FAQ
Why is understanding consumer behavior important for marketers?
Consumer behavior is the study of how individuals and groups make decisions about the purchase, use, and disposal of goods and services. Understanding this behavior allows marketers to:
- Develop targeted marketing campaigns: create messages that match the needs, motivations and buying habits of specific consumer groups.
- Create effective marketing strategies: adapt strategies to different stages of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, purchase, etc.).
- Develop more relevant products and services: Understand what motivates people to buy and what pain points need to be addressed to create products that truly engage consumers.
- Marketing Spend Optimization: Allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on channels and tactics that resonate with your target audience.
- Increase brand loyalty: by understanding consumer psychology, you can foster positive brand experiences that lead to customer loyalty.
What are the most important factors influencing consumer behavior?
- Psychological factors: needs, motivations, perceptions, attitudes and learning influence consumer decision making.
- Social factors: culture, reference groups, social media influence and family dynamics can shape consumer behavior.
- Personal factors: age, gender, income, education level, lifestyle and personality influence purchasing decisions.
- Important factors: a particular situation (e.g. time pressure, mood) can influence how consumers make a purchase.
How can marketers use market research to understand consumer behavior?
- Surveys: Collect quantitative data on demographics, preferences and buying habits of a large sample.
- Audiences: Get quality information about products, services or marketing messages through group discussions.
- Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with individual consumers to understand their motivations and decision-making processes.
- Customer observation: observe how consumers interact with products or services in real life.
- Social Media Listening: Monitor online conversations and social media trends to understand consumer sentiment and preferences. What common models of consumer behavior do marketers use?
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: This model suggests that consumers prioritize basic needs such as food and shelter before moving on to higher needs such as esteem and self-actualization.
- Probabilistic Model of Preparation: This model proposes that consumers process information differently depending on their level of involvement. Marketers can use it to create compelling messages for large and small purchases.
How can marketers use their understanding of consumer behavior to create effective marketing campaigns?
- Segmentation and targeting: Segment your audience based on consumer behavior and tailor your marketing messages to the specific needs and motivations of each segment.
- Content Marketing: Create valuable and informative content that addresses consumer pain points and positions your brand as a trusted resource.
- Storytelling: Use storytelling to connect with consumers on an emotional level and make your brand message more memorable.
- Omnichannel Marketing: Develop a unified marketing experience across all channels (online, offline, mobile) to reach consumers throughout their journey.
Pricing
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