How do consumers respond to various marketing effort the company might use?

Answer 1

"Consumer behavior is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society."

Consumers make many buying decisions every day. Most large company's research consumer buying decisions in great detail to answer questions about what consumers buy where they buy, how and how much they buy, when they buy, and why they buy. Marketers can study actual consumer purchases to find out what they buy, where, and how much. But learning about the whys of consumer buying behavior is not so easy-the answers are often locked deep within the consumer's head.

The company that really understands how consumers will respond to different product features, prices, and advertising appeals has a great advantage over its competitors. The starting point is the stimulus-response model of buyer behavior. Marketers must figure out what is in the buyer's black box.

Marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Other stimuli include major forces and events in the buyer's environment: economic, technological, political, and cultural. All these inputs enter the buyer's black box, where they are turned into a set of observable buyer responses: product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing, and purchase amount.

The marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses inside the consumer's black box, which has two parts. First, the buyer's characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli. Second, the buyer's decision process itself affects the buyer's behavior. Consumer purchases are influenced strongly by cultural, social, personal, and psychological characteristics, marketers cannot control such factors, but they must take them into account.

The study of consumers helps firms and organizations improve their marketing strategies by understanding issues such as how

• The psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and select between different alternatives (e.g., brands, products);
• The psychology of how the consumer is influenced by his or her environment (e.g., culture, family, signs, media);
• The behavior of consumers while shopping or making other marketing decisions;
• Limitations in consumer knowledge or information processing abilities influence decisions and marketing outcome;
• How consumer motivation and decision strategies differ between products that differ in their level of importance or interest that they entail for the consumer; and
• How marketers can adapt and improve their marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to more effectively reach the consumer.

Understanding these issues helps us adapt our strategies by taking the consumer into consideration. For example, by understanding that a number of different messages compete for our potential customers' attention, we learn that to be effective, advertisements must usually be repeated extensively. We also learn that consumers will sometimes be persuaded more by logical arguments, but at other times will be persuaded more by emotional or symbolic appeals. By understanding the consumer, we will be able to make a more informed decision as to which strategy to employ.