Understanding Consumer Behavior

“Consumer is King” and “Consumer is always right” are the buzzwords in modern marketing. The activities of the marketer revolve around the consumer behavior. The firms have to provide what their consumers want and for this purpose they adopt various types of marketing strategies to reach and alter the consumer’s buying behavior in favor of their products and services.
Consumer behavior is a dynamic, multidisciplinary and multidimensional process and studies when, why, how, and where people do or do not buy. Marketing has borrowed the elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology and economics to explain the consumer behavior. The consudmer behavior is now a distinct discipline of marketing which attempts to understand the buyer decision making process, both individually and in groups
Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist who is also known as of the the pioneers of modern social, organizational, and applied psychology provides a very useful classification of Buyer’s behavior. this is known as Lewin’s Proposition. The Lewin’s proposition says:
B= (P,E)
The above proposition says that Buyer’s behavior (B) is a function of Personal Influences (P) and Outside or External environmental forces (E).
The most generic model of understanding the buyer behavior is stimulus-response pattern, which say that response of the consumer is a result of different types of stimuli. These stimuli are applied to the consumer and consumer in return comes up with a response. The stimuli can be marketing or environmental stimuli. The marketing stimuli are subject to manipulation by the marketer while the environmental stimuli like economy, culture etc are subject to consumer’s environment. The response is to buy and not to buy, what to buy, which brand, which dealer, which location and so on…
The above simple model is shown in following graphic:

www.gktoday.in

The above graphic shows that there is a complex and continuous interaction of stimuli, consumer characteristics, and decision process and consumer responses. The different determinants of the Consumer behavior are discussed briefly in the following pages:

List of Topics :Marketing Aptitude for Banking Examinations


1 Comment

  1. Prabhat

    March 2, 2012 at 2:10 am

    Please update the data & mension few latest examples in each topic.

Leave a Reply to Prabhat Cancel reply