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Chapter 4
Understanding
Consumer
Buying
Behavior
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
• High-involvement purchases:
– Involve goods or services that are
psychologically important to the buyer
because they address social or ego needs
and therefore carry social and psychological
risks.
– May also involve financial risk.
– A high-involvement product for one buyer may
be a low-involvement one for another.
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Steps in the High-Involvement, Complex Decision-Making
Process
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Step 1: Problem identification
– Purchase-decision processes are triggered by
unsatisfied needs or wants.
– We tend to focus on those needs that are
strongest.
– A need can become stronger and be brought
to our attention by a deterioration of our actual
state or an upward revision of our ideal state.
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Step 2: Information search
– People seek additional information about
alternatives brands until they perceive that the
costs of obtaining more information are equal
to the additional value or benefit derived.
– Opportunity cost of the time involved in
seeking information.
– Psychological costs involved in searching for
information.
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Sources of information
– Personal sources
– Commercial sources
– Public sources of information
• Commercial sources perform an informing function
for consumers.
• Personal and public sources serve an evaluating
and legitimizing function.
• The Internet is reducing the opportunity costs of
information gathering
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Step 3: Evaluation of alternatives
– Consumers simplify their evaluation in several
ways.
• They focus on their evoked set.
• They evaluate each of the brands in the evoked
set on a limited number of product dimensions or
attributes.
• They combine evaluations across attributes, taking
into account the relative importance of those
attributes.
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Step 4: Purchase
– Consumers usually select the source they
perceive to be best on those attributes most
important to them.
• Step 5: Postpurchase evaluation
– The person’s expectation level and evaluation
of how well the product actually did perform.
– The evaluation feeds back into memory where
it can be recalled for a similar decision.
– Consistent positive experiences can ultimately
lead to brand loyalty.
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Low-Involvement Purchase
Decisions
• Most purchase decisions are low in
consumer involvement.
– Extensive information search is absent.
• Two low-involvement buying decisions:
– Inertia
• Consumers either buy brands at random or buy the
same brand repetitively to avoid making a choice.
– Impulse purchasing and variety seeking
• Occurs when consumers impulsively decide to buy
a different brand from their customary choice or
some new variety of a product.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
• Understanding level of involvement
enables better marketing decisions
– Product design and positioning decisions
• High-involvement goods needs to be designed to
provide at least some benefits that are
demonstrably superior.
• Firms that market low-involvement goods need to
pay particular attention to basic use-related
attributes.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
– Pricing decisions
• High-involvement: Purchase of brand they
believe will deliver the greatest value.
• Low-involvement: Products are largely or
solely bought on the basis of low price.
– Advertising and promotion decisions
• High-involvement: Promotional vehicles
that communicate in greater detail.
• Low-involvement: Focus on a few main
points and deliver the message frequently.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
– Distribution decisions
• Low-involvement: Extensive retail distribution
is particularly important.
• High-involvement: Extensive retail coverage is
less critical.
– Strategies to increase consumer involvement
• Link the product to some involving issue.
• Tie the product to a personally involving
situation.
• Add an important feature to an unimportant
product.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception and memory
– Perception is the process by which a person
selects, organizes, and interprets information.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception process for high-involvement
products:
– Exposure to a piece of information, such as a
new product, an ad, or a friend’s
recommendation, leads to attention, then to
comprehension, and finally to retention in
memory.
– Once consumers have fully perceived the
information, they use it to evaluate alternative
brands and to decide which to purchase.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception process for low-involvement
products:
– Consumers have information in their
memories without going through the
sequence of attention and comprehension.
– Exposure may cause consumers to retain
enough information so that they are familiar
with a brand when they see it in a store.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Selectivity and organization guide
consumers’ perceptual processes and help
explain why different consumers perceive
product information differently.
– Selectivity: Even though the environment is
full of product information, consumers pick
and choose only selected pieces of
information and ignore the rest.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
– Perceptual vigilance: For high-involvement
purchases, consumers pay particular attention
to information related to the needs they want
to satisfy and the particular brands they are
considering for purchase
– Perceptual Defense: Consumers tend to avoid
information that contradicts their current
beliefs and attitudes.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Memory limitations
– Limitation of the human memory concerns marketers.
• Human memory works in two stages:
– Information from the environment is first processed by
the short-term memory, which forgets most of it within
30 seconds or less.
– Some information is transferred to long-term memory.
– For information to be transferred to long-term memory
for later recall, it must be actively rehearsed and
internalized.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perceptual organization
– Categorization helps consumers process
known information quickly and efficiently.
– Integration means that consumers perceive
separate pieces of related information as an
organized whole.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Effects of stimulus characteristics
– Personal characteristics influence the
information consumers pay attention to,
comprehend, and remember.
– Message characteristics and the way it is
communicated influence consumers’
perceptions.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Needs and Attitudes
– The Fishbein model specifies how consumers
combine evaluations of a brand across
multiple attributes to arrive at a single overall
attitude toward that brand.
– This approach is compensatory in nature.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Noncompensatory attitude models
– The mental processes involved in forming an
attitude are quite complex.
– Consumers may evaluate alternative brands
on only one attribute at a time particularly with
low-involvement products.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Marketing implications of attitude models
– Marketers must have information about:
• The attributes or decision criteria used to evaluate
a particular product category.
• The relative importance of those attributes to
different consumers.
• How consumers rate their brand relative to
competitors’ offerings on important attributes.
– Multiattribute models show the consumer’s
ideal combination of product/service
attributes, each of which is weighted as to its
relative importance.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Attitude change
– Changing attitudes toward the product class
or type.
– Changing the importance attached to
attributes.
– Adding a salient attribute to the existing set.
– Improving ratings of the brand on one or more
salient attributes.
– Lowering the ratings of the salient product
characteristics of competing brands.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Demographics influence
– The nature of consumers’ needs and wants.
– Their ability to buy products or services to
satisfy those needs.
– The perceived importance of various
attributes or choice criteria used to evaluate
alternative brands.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Personality and self-concept
– Brands are perceived to have personalities,
and consumers are likely to choose brands
whose personalities match their own.
– Consumers tend to choose brands with
personalities that match either their own selfconcept or their ideal self-concept.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Lifestyles
– To obtain lifestyle data, consumers are asked
to indicate the extent to which they
agree/disagree with a series of statements
involving price consciousness, family
activities, spectator sports, traditional values,
adverturesomeness, and fashion.
– Lifestyle typologies or psychographic profiles.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Culture
– Culture is the set of beliefs, attitudes, and
behavior patterns shared by members of a
society and transmitted from one generation
to the next through socialization.
– Cultural differences across countries create
both problems and opportunities for
international marketers.
– Subcultures
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Social class
– Status groupings largely based on similarities
in income, education, and occupation.
– It is possible to infer certain behavior
concerning some products and services,
including class members’ reactions to
advertising.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Reference groups include a variety of
groups that affect consumer behavior
through:
• Normative compliance
• Value-expressed influence: Involves conforming to
gain status within one’s group.
• Informational influence: Involves the use of certain
influentials to help assess the merits of a given
product/service.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• The Family
– It serves as the primary socialization agent.
– It has a great and lasting influence on its
younger members’ attitudes toward various
brands and stores.
– Family members tend to specialize in the
purchase of certain products either because
of their interest or expertise or the role
structure of the family.
– Influence varies across countries.
– Family life cycle.
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Take-Aways
• Not all purchase decisions are equally
important or psychologically involving for
the consumer.
– People engage in a more extensive decisionmaking process, involving a more detailed
search for information and comparison of
alternatives, when buying high-involvement
goods and services than when purchasing
more mundane, low-involvement items.
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Take-Aways
• A given marketing strategy will not be
equally effective for both high- and lowinvolvement products.
– The consumer marketer’s first task, then, is to
determine whether the majority of potential
customers in the target segment are likely to
be highly involved with the purchase decision
or not.
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Take-Aways
• For low-involvement products, marketers
need to focus their promotional messages
on a few frequently repeated points and to
distribute such products extensively.
• Consumers often prefer different brands
because of differences in their
psychological or personal characteristics,
such as their perceptions, memories,
attitudes, and lifestyles.
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Take-Aways
• Regardless of the consumer’s level of
involvement with a product category,
consumers often prefer different brands
because of differences in their social
relationships, such as their culture, social
class, reference groups, and family
circumstances.
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