CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR
The Behaviour that
consumers display in
searching for, purchasing,
using, evaluating, and
disposing of products,
services, and ideas.
FOCUS ON WHAT IT MEANS
Consumer Behaviour
focuses on how individuals
make decisions to spend
their available resources
i.e. TIME, MONEY, EFFORT
on CONSUMPTION related
items.
CONTENTS OF DECISION
MAKING
•What they BUY
• Why they BUY it
• When they BUY it
• Where they BUY it
• How often they BUY it
• How often they USE it
• How they EVALUATE it after the
purchase
• The IMPACT of such evaluations
on FUTURE purchases
• and, How they DISPOSE of it.
THE PERSONAL CONSUMER
He/She buys goods and services
for his or her own use, for the use
of the household, or as a gift for a
friend. In each of these contexts,
the products are bought for final
use by individuals, who are
referred to as END USERS or
ultimate users.
Development of the Marketing Concept and
The Discipline of Consumer Behaviour
The field of Consumer Behaviour
is rooted in the Marketing
concept, a Business orientation
that evolved in the 1950s through
several alternative approaches
toward doing business referred to,
respectively, as:
THE PRODUCTION CONCEPT
It assumes that consumers are mostly
interested in product availability at low
prices; its implicit Marketing objectives
are cheap, efficient production and
intensive distribution. This orientation
makes sense when consumers are more
interested in obtaining the product than
they are in specific features and will buy
what’s available rather than wait
for what they really want. Today
using this orientation makes sense in
developing countries or in other
situations in which the main objective is
to expand the market.
THE PRODUCT CONCEPT
It assumes that consumers will buy the
product that offers them the highest
Quality, the best performance, and the
most features. A Product orientation
leads the company to strive constantly
to improve the Quality of its product and
to add new features that are technically
feasible without finding out first
whether or not consumers really want
these features. A Product orientation
often leads to “Marketing Myopia” that
is, a focus on the product rather than on
the consumer needs it presumes to
satisfy.
THE SELLING CONCEPT
A Natural Evolution from both the
production concept and the product
concept is the Selling concept, in which
a Marketer,s primary focus is selling the
product(s) that it has unilaterally
decided to [Link] assumption of
the selling concept is that consumers
are unlikely to buy the Product unless
they are aggressively persuaded to do
so – mostly through the “Hard sell”
approach. The problem with this
approach is that it fails to consider
customer satisfaction.
THE MARKETING CONCEPT
It assumes that instead of trying to
persuade customers to buy what the
firm has already produced, Marketing-
oriented firms found that it was a lot
easier to produce only products they had
first confirmed, through research, that
consumers wanted. Consumers needs
and wants became the firm’s primary
focus. This consumer-oriented
Marketing philosophy came to be known
as the Marketing concept.
THE MARKETING CONCEPT
The Marketing concept is based on the
premise that a Marketer should make
what it can sell; instead of trying to
sell what it has made. Whereas the
Selling concept focuses on the needs
of the SELLERS and on existing
products, the Marketing concept
focuses on the needs of the BUYER.
The Selling concept focuses on profits
through sales volume; the Marketing
concept focuses on profits through
customer satisfaction.