Readings:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-marketing/chapter/the-consumer-decision-process/
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-marketing/chapter/consumer-experience/
Instructions
- From the readings, reflect on a recent purchase you made.
- Provide examples of a high involvement and low involvement purchases
- Discuss the external and internal influences for the purchases. Use at least three terms from the reading with bold and underline.
Low-Involvement purchases tend to be made by habitual decisions (e.g., dish washing liquid, toothbrush). These require minimal information processing.
High-Involvement purchases tend to be made by lengthy or more involved decisions (e.g., a car or a house). These are usually considered highly important to consumers and require extensive information processing.
The Nature of Consumer Behavior
External Influences:
- Culture • Demographics and social stratification • Ethnic, religious, and regional subcultures • Families and households • Groups •Marketing Activities
Internal Influences:
- Perception • Learning • Memory • Motives • Personality • Emotions • Attitudes
Key Terms from the 4 Readings (pick 3)
- Buyer Decision Processes: The Buyer Decision Processes are the decision-making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service.
- Abraham Harold Maslow: He was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of self-actualization.
- need recognition: the first step in the buying decision process, where the problem or need is understood
- John Dewey: He was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology.
- Consumer Decision Process: Also known as the Buying Decision Process, the process describes the fundamental stages that a customer goes through when deciding to buy a product. Many scholars have given their version of the buying decision model.
- Information Search: The second of five stages that comprise the Consumer Decision Process. It can be categorized as internal or external research.
- External Research: When a person has no prior knowledge about a product, which then leads them to seek information from personal or public sources.
- Evoked Set: The number of alternatives that are considered by consumers during the problem-solving process.
- Evaluation of Alternatives: This is the third stage in the Consumer Decision Process. During this stage, consumers compare the brands and products that are in their evoked set.
- Purchase Decision: The fourth stage in the consumer decision process and when the purchase actually takes place.
- cognitive dissonance: This term is used in modern psychology to describe the state of simultaneously holding two or more conflicting ideas, beliefs, values, or emotional reactions.
- Consumer Behavior: The study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs; and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society.
- Purchase Decision Process: The decision-making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service.
- Perception: The organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment.
- External, or extrinsic Motivation: The performance of an activity in order to attain an outcome, which then contradicts intrinsic motivation.
- Intrinsic Motivation: The incentive to undertake an activity based on the expected enjoyment of the activity itself, rather than external benefits that might result.
- motivation: The psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal and elicits, controls, and sustains certain goal directed behaviors.
- Learning: The process of acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences. This process may involve synthesizing different types of information.
- Purchase Decision Process: The decision-making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service.
- Carl Jung: (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.
- attitude: an expression of favor or disfavor toward a person, place, thing, or event (the attitude object). Prominent psychologist Gordon Allport once described attitudes “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology. “
- Buyer Decision Process: the decision making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service.
- Black Box Model: shows the interaction of stimuli, consumer characteristics, decision process and consumer responses.
- Social Marketing: the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.
- public policy: the set of policies (laws, plans, actions, behaviors) of a government; plans and methods of action that govern that society; a system of laws, courses of action, and priorities directing a government action.
- persona: A social role.
- prosumer: A serious, enthusiastic consumer: not professional (earning money), but of similar interest and skills to a (generally lower level) professional, or aspiring to such. The target market of prosumer equipment.
- influencer: A person who or a thing which influences.
life cycle: The useful life of a product or system; the developmental history of an individual or group in society.
- target market: A group of people whose needs and preferences match the product range of a company and to whom those products are marketed.
- opinion leader: The agent who is an active media user and who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users.
- reference group: A reference group refers to a group to which an individual or another group is compared.
- clout: Influence or effectiveness, especially political
- disposable income: The amount of a person’s or group’s monetary income which is available to be saved or spent (on either essential or non-essential items), after deducting all taxes and other governmental fees.
- social class: A class of people, based on social power, wealth or another criterion.
- socio-economic: Of or pertaining to a combination of social and economic factors.
- credit card fraud: A wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using a credit card or any similar payment mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. The purpose may be to obtain goods without paying, or to obtain unauthorized funds from an account.
- Black Friday: The day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
- Perception: The organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment.
- culture: The arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation. The beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life.
- reference group: A concept referring to a group to which an individual or another group is compared. It is the group to which the individual relates or aspires to relate himself or herself psychologically.
- consumer involvement: The level of interaction and regard that a consumer has with a given product.
Expectations, Grading, and Feedback:
- In grading the discussions, I am looking for the quality of your own post.
- I am looking for a response that clearly expresses an understanding of the corresponding consumer behavior topics and terms as explained in the text.
