Chapter 6
LO1 The Importance of understanding consumer behavior
Consumer behavior: how consumers make purchase decisions and how the use and dispose of
the purchased goods or services; also includes factors that influence purchase decisions and product
use.
LO2 Consumer Decision Making Process:
1. Need Recognition: occurs when consumers are faced with an imbalance between actual and
desired states that arouses and activates the consumer decision-making process.
a. A Want is the new way that a consumer goes about addressing a need.
i. Need recognition is triggered when a consumer is exposed to either an internal
or an external stimulus.
1. Internal stimuli: occurrences you experience, such as hunger or thirst.
2. External stimuli: influences from an outside source such as someone’s
recommendation of a new restaurant, the color of an auto or a brand
name mentioned by a friend, or an advertisement on television or radio.
a. A marketing manager’s objective is to get consumers to
recognize an imbalance between their present status and their
preferred state.
2. Information Services: after recognizing a need or want, consumers search for information about
the various alternatives available to satisfy it.
a. For examples, as gasoline prices increase, many people searching for information on
vehicles that use alternatives to gasoline.
i. Internal information search: person recalls information stems largely from
previous experience with a product.
ii. External information search: outside environment:
1. Nonmarketing-controlled: not associated with marketers promoting a
product: personal experience (family, friends, acquaintances, and
coworkers who may recommend a product or service; Consumer
Reports
2. Marketing-controlled: biased toward a specific product because it
originates with marketers promoting that product: mass media, sales
promotion, sales people
b. Three factors influencing the external information search
i. Consumer’s knowledge about the product or service will also affect the extent
of a search.
ii. Affected by confidence of the consumer in one’s decision making process.
iii. Product experience: prior experience with product: likely to limit their search to
items related to the positive experience.
c. The extent of the search is positively related to the amount of interest a consumer has
in a product.
d. The search should yield a group of brands (Evoke Set) or (Consideration Set)
3. Evaluation of Alternatives and Purchase: after gathering information and constructing an evoked
set of alternative products, the consumer is ready to make a decision.
a. Develop a set of criteria
i. using conceptual cues or primers that can influence the decision
ii. pick a product attribute and then exclude all products in the set that don’t have
that attribute
