Characteristic Affecting Consumer Purchase Behavior

The marketers need to understand the role played by the buyer’s culture, subculture and social class.

Culture: Culture is the set of basic value, perception, wants and behaviors learned by a member of society from family and other institution. Culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior. Every group or society has a cultural influence on buying behavior may vary greatly from country to country, or even neighborhood to neighborhood.

For example, when business representative of a US community trying to market itself to Taiwan learned a hard cultural lesson. Seeking more foreign trade, they arrived in Taiwan bearing gifts of green baseball caps. It turned out that the trip was scheduled a month before Taiwan elections, and that green was the color of the political opposition party. Worse yet, that according to Taiwan culture, a man wears green to signify that his wife has been unfaithful.

Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts in order to discover new product that might be wanted. For example, the shift toward informality has resulted more demand for casual clothing and simpler home furnishing.

Subculture: Each culture contains smaller subcultures. Subculture is a group of people with shared value system based on common life experiences and situations. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions. For example of important subcultures include Hispanic, African American, Asian and Mature consumers.

1. Hispanic consumers: Americans of Cuban, Mexican, Central American, South American and Puerto Rican descent, ought more than $425 billion worth of goods and services each year. Hispanics have long been a target of food, beverages, and household care products. Most marketer now produce products tailored to the Hispanic market and promote them using Spanish language and media.
2. African American consumers: Although more price conscious than other segments, African American consumers are also strongly motivated by quality and selection. African American consumers place more importance on brand names, are more bran loyal and do less shopping around. In recent years, many companies have developed special products and services, packing and appeals to meet the needs of these consumers. A wide variety of magazines, television channels, and other media now target this consumer segment.
3. Asian American consumers: Asian American consumer is the fastest growing and most affluent U.S. demographic segment, now number more than 10 million, with a disposable income of $229 billion annually. Until recently, packaged good firms, automobile companies, retailers, and fast food chains have legged in this consumer segment. Wal-mart for example, in one Seattle store, where the Asian American consumer represent over 13 percent, they stocks a large selection of CDs and videos of Asian artist, Asian favored health and beauty products, and children’s learning video that feature multiple language tracks.
4. Mature Consumers: As the U.S population ages, mature consumers are becoming a very attractive market. Now 75 million strong, the 50 and older population will swell to 115 million in the next 25 years. Mature consumer re better off financially and have more spare time than are younger consumer groups, and because of that they are an ideal market for exotic travel, restaurant and high-tech home entertainment. Their desire to look as young as they feel also make more mature consumers good candidates for cosmetics and personal care products, health foods, fitness product, and other items that combat the effect of aging.

Social Class

Almost every society has some form of social class structure. Social classes are society’s relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interest, and behaviors. Social class is not determined by single factor, but is measure as combination of occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables. Social classes show distinct product and brand preferences in areas such as clothing, home, furnishing, leisure activity, and automobiles.

Social Factor

A consumer’s behavior also is influenced by social factors, such as the consumer’s groups, family, and social roles and status.

Groups: A consumer’s behavior is influenced by many small groups. A group can be defined as two or more people who interact to accomplish individual or mutual goals. Groups that have direct influence and to which a person belongs are called membership groups. In contrast, reference groups serve as direct or indirect points of comparison or reference in forming a consumer’s attitudes or behavior.

Manufactures of products and brands subjected to strong group influence must figure out how to reach opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are persons within reference group who, because of special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exerts influence on others. In other case, marketers may use buzz marketing by enlisting or even creating opinion leaders to spread the word about their brands.

Family: Family member can strongly influence consumer’s behavior. Husband- wife involvement varies widely by product category and by stage in the buying process. In the United States, the wife traditionally has been the main purchasing agent for the family, especially in the areas of food, household products, and clothing.

Children may also have strong influence on family buying decision. For example children as young as age six may influence on the family car purchase decision. “By six, they know the names of cars,” says an industry analyst. Chevrolet recognizes this influence in marketing its Chevy Venture minivan.

Roles and status: The consumer’s position in each group can be defined in terms of both role and status. A role consists of the activities people expected to perform according to persons around them. Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society. People often choose products that show their status in society.

Personal Factor

A consumer’s decision also are influenced by personal characteristics such as the consumer’s age and life cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, personality and self concept:

1. Age and life cycle stage: People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetimes. Taste in food. Clothes, furniture, and recreation are often age related. Buying is also shaped by the stage of family life cycle. Traditional family life cycle stages include young singles and married couples with children. Sony recently overhauled its marketing approach in order to target products services to consumers based on their life stages.
2. Occupation: A consumer’s occupation affects the goods and services bought. Blue collar workers tend to buy more rugged work clothes, whereas executives buy more business suits.
3. Economic situation: A consumer’s economic situation will affect product choice. If economic indicator point to recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition, and reprice their products closely.
4. Lifestyle: People coming from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may have quite different lifestyles. Lifestyle is a consumer’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her psychographics. It involves consumer’s activities, interest and opinions. When used carefully, the lifestyle concept can help the marketer changing consumer values and how they affect buying behavior.
5. Personality and self concept: Each consumer’s distinct personality influences his or her buying behavior. Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and lasting response to one’s own environment. For example, coffee marketer have discovered that heavy coffee drinker tend to be high on sociability. Thus Starbucks and other coffee houses create environments in which people can relax and socialize over a cup of steaming coffee.

Psychological Factor

A consumer’s buying choices are further influenced by four major psychological factors:

1. Motivation: A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity. A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
2. Perception: A motivated person is ready to act. How the person acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form meaningful picture of the world.
3. Learning: When people act, they learn. Learning describes change in individual’s behavior arising from experience.
4. Beliefs and Attitudes: Through doing and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes. A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something. Marketers are interested in the beliefs that people formulate about specific products and services, because these beliefs make up product and brand images that affect buying behavior.

Attitude describes a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings and tendencies toward an object or idea. Attitudes put people into a frame of mind liking or disliking things, or moving toward or away from them.