The American consumer market consists of more than 323 million people who consume more than $11.8 trillion worth of goods and services each year, making it one of the most attractive consumer markets in the world. Consumers vary greatly in terms of cultural, social, personal, and psychological makeup. Understanding how these differences affect consumer buying behavior is one of the biggest challenges marketers face.
The consumer market consists of all the individuals and households that buy or acquire goods and services for personal consumption. The simplest model of consumer buyer behavior is the stimulus-response model. According to this model, marketing stimuli (the four Ps) and other major forces (economic, technological, political, cultural) enter the consumer’s “black box” and produce certain responses. Once in the black box, these inputs produce observable buyer responses, such as brand choice, purchase location and timing, and brand engagement and relationship behavior.
Consumer buyer behavior is influenced by four key sets of buyer characteristics: cultural, social, personal, and psychological. Although many of these factors cannot be influenced by the marketer, they can be useful in identifying interested buyers and shaping products and appeals to serve consumer needs better. Culture is the most basic determinant of a person’s wants and behavior. Subcultures are “cultures within cultures” that have distinct values and lifestyles and can be based on anything from age to ethnicity. Many companies focus their marketing programs on the special needs of certain cultural and subcultural segments, such as Hispanic American, African American, and Asian American consumers.
Social factors also influence a buyer’s behavior. A person’s reference groups—family, friends, social networks, professional associations—strongly affect product and brand choices. The buyer’s age, life-cycle stage, occupation, economic circumstances, personality, and other personal characteristics influence his or her buying decisions. Consumer lifestyles—the whole pattern of acting and interacting in the world—are also an important influence on purchase decisions. Finally, consumer buying behavior is influenced by four major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes. Each of these factors provides a different perspective for understanding the workings of the buyer’s black box.
Buying behavior may vary greatly across different types of products and buying decisions. Consumers undertake complex buying behavior when they are highly involved in a purchase and perceive significant differences among brands. Dissonance-reducing behavior occurs when consumers are highly involved but see little difference among brands. Habitual buying behavior occurs under conditions of low involvement and little significant brand difference. In situations characterized by low involvement but significant perceived brand differences, consumers engage in variety-seeking buying behavior.
When making a purchase, the buyer goes through a decision process consisting of need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior. The marketer’s job is to understand the buyer’s behavior at each stage and the influences that are operating. During need recognition, the consumer recognizes a problem or need that could be satisfied by a product or service in the market. Once the need is recognized, the consumer is aroused to seek more information and moves into the information search stage. With information in hand, the consumer proceeds to alternative evaluation, during which the information is used to evaluate brands in the choice set. From there, the consumer makes a purchase decision and actually buys the product. In the final stage of the buyer decision process, postpurchase behavior, the consumer takes action based on satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
The product adoption process is made up of five stages: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. New-product marketers must think about how to help consumers move through these stages. With regard to the diffusion process for new products, consumers respond at different rates, depending on consumer and product characteristics. Consumers may be innovators, early adopters, early mainstream, late mainstream, or lagging adopters. Each group may require different marketing approaches. Marketers often try to bring their new products to the attention of potential early adopters, especially those who are opinion leaders. Finally, several characteristics influence the rate of adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, divisibility, and communicability.
Consumer market (p 134)
Subculture (p 136)
Social class (p 138)
Opinion leader (p 139)
Personality (p 144)
Motive (drive) (p 145)
Perception (p 148)
Need recognition (p 152)
Purchase decision (p 153)
New product (p 154)
Adoption process (p 154)
Go to mymktlab.com to complete the problems marked with this icon .
5-1 Define the consumer market and describe the four major sets of factors that influence consumer buyer behavior. Which characteristics influenced your choice when deciding on the school you would attend? Are those the same characteristics that would influence you when deciding what to do on Saturday night? Explain. (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-2 What is a total market strategy, and why do marketers use this approach? Provide a recent example of a product or service that uses the total market strategy approach and discuss the components that make it effective or ineffective. (AACSB: Communication, Diversity, Reflective Thinking)
5-3 What is subculture? Describe at least two subcultures to which you belong and identify any reference groups that might influence your consumption behavior. (AACSB: Communication; Diversity; Reflective Thinking)
5-4 Briefly describe the four psychological factors influencing consumer buyer behavior. Explain their importance to marketers. (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-5 Name and describe the stages in the adoption process. How might a student go through the adoption process when choosing a college or university? (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-6 Researchers study the role of personality on consumer purchase behavior. One research project—Beyond the Purchase—offers a range of surveys consumers can take to learn more about their own personality in general and their consumer personality in particular. Register at http://www.beyondthepurchase.org/ and take the “Spending Habits” surveys along with any of the other surveys that interest you. What do these surveys tell you about your general and consumer personality? Do you agree with the findings? Why or why not? (AACSB: Communication; Use of IT; Diversity; Reflective Thinking)
5-7 Discuss the steps of the consumer buying process for a new product. Next, identify a new product that you have recently adopted into your daily lifestyle. What is the new product that was adopted? As a consumer, did you use the adoption stages as outlined in the chapter? Why or why not? (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-8 The characteristics of a new product affect its rate of adoption. Identify the five characteristics that influence the rate of adoption and describe how each factor will influence the rate of adoption of the Apple Watch. (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
Fashion and lifestyle bloggers that are multimillionaires? Believe it. Simple fashion blogs have blown up to become huge income sources. Bloggers have integrated affiliate marketing, built their own brands or brand collaborations, and included sponsored content in their blogsites. Companies now see fashion bloggers as increasingly relevant digital influencers. Firms have also found that bloggers can drive more sales volume than celebrity endorsements. Therefore, brands are building more influencer campaigns into their marketing budgets. Ultimately, this means that bloggers can earn significant incomes. For example, the Refinery29 blog started out as a regular fashion blog with its bloggers earning an average income of $55,000 a year. It quickly turned into a fashion and lifestyle empire for Refinery29 founders Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries. The site now makes $24 million a year, partially from revenue generated when these influencers push sales to affiliates through links embedded in the blog. To learn more about how much money the world’s top fashion and lifestyle bloggers earn and about Refinery29’s journey, visit www.inc.com/rebecca-borison/refinery29-chat.html and www.whowhatwear.com/how-do-bloggers-make-money.
5-9 Find an example of a blog on a topic that interests you. Are there advertisements on the blog? Does the blogger appear to be sponsored by any companies? Is there information regarding sponsorship? Write a brief report of your observations. (AACSB: Use of IT; Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-10 Digital influencers can shape consumer product acceptance and adoption. Discuss the process of making a purchase through a podcast, blog, or social media account based on the recommendation of a digital influencer. Are sponsored content, paid advertisements, unpaid advertisements, or product testimonials on blogsites credible information sources? Why or why not? (AACSB: Communication, Reflective Thinking)
Water is water, right? Not so! Beverly Hills 90H20 claims to be designed “by a world-class team of experts, including a water sommelier.” The winner of the World’s Best Water Award, this water is sourced in the California mountains. At $72 for a case of 24 bottles, this is not your everyday drinking water. The 7.5 alkalinity “silky” water is loaded with minerals and electrolytes. It is available in fine restaurants, gourmet markets, and luxury hotels but is sold only in California. Beverly Hills 90H20 isn’t the only luxury water, and it’s actually somewhat of a bargain. Fillico Beverly Hills (from Japan) costs $100 per bottle. That’s without the gold or silver crown cap—you can double the price if you want that. Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani gold-bottled water tops them all at $60,000 per bottle!
5-11 What buying factors are most likely affecting consumers who purchase luxury bottle water? (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking)
5-12 Discuss the ethical issues surrounding the bottled water industry. (AACSB: Communication; Ethical Reasoning)
One way consumers can evaluate alternatives is to identify important attributes and assess how purchase alternatives perform on those attributes. Consider the purchase of a tablet. Each attribute, such as screen size, is given a weight to reflect its level of importance to that consumer. Then the consumer evaluates each alternative on each attribute. For example, in the following table, price (weighted at 0.5) is the most important attribute for this consumer. The consumer believes that Brand C performs best on price, rating it 7 (higher ratings indicate higher performance). Brand B is perceived as performing the worst on this attribute (rating of 3). Screen size and available apps are the consumer’s next most important attributes. Operating system is least important.
A score can be calculated for each brand by multiplying the importance weight for each attribute by the brand’s score on that attribute. These weighted scores are then summed to determine the score for that brand. For example, ScoreBrand . This consumer will select the brand with the highest score.
5-13 Calculate the scores for brands B and C. Which brand would this consumer likely choose? (AACSB: Communication; Analytic Reasoning)
5-14 Which brand is this consumer least likely to purchase? Discuss two ways the marketer of this brand can enhance consumer attitudes toward purchasing its brand. (AACSB: Communication; Reflective Thinking; Analytic Reasoning)
IMG Worldwide is the world’s largest sports entertainment media company. In years past, IMG was all about professional golf and tennis marketing. But today, IMG handles sales and marketing activities for 70 to 80 colleges, making college sports marketing the company’s highest-growth business. In short, IMG handles anything and everything that touches the college sports consumer short of actually playing games on the court or field.
Although you might think that all college sports fans are created equal, IMG finds that nothing could be further from the truth. How different fans consume sports and sports-related activities is affected by geographical, generational, and institutional factors. IMG focuses on comprehensively understanding the process that consumers go through to view or attend a sporting event. It then connects with consumers at each and every stage.
After viewing the video featuring IMG Worldwide, answer the following questions:
5-15 What “product” is a college athletics department selling?
5-16 Discuss how a college sports fan might go through the buying decision process, providing examples for each stage.
5-17 Of the four sets of factors affecting consumer behavior, which most strongly affects how college sports fans consume a sport?
When Debbie Sterling was in high school, her math teacher recognized her quantitative talent and suggested she pursue engineering as a college major. At the time, Sterling couldn’t figure out why her teacher thought she should drive trains for a living. But the suggestion was enough to get her started down the right path. After four years at Stanford, Sterling graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. But throughout the course of her studies, Sterling noticed the lack of women in her engineering program—a characteristic phenomenon in a field where men outnumber women 86 percent to 14 percent. This observation ignited an obsession in Sterling. She set out on a mission to inspire a future generation of female engineers by disrupting the pink aisle in toy stores.
During the past few years, among other accolades, Sterling has been named Time’s “Person of the Moment” and one of Business Insider’s “30 Women Who Are Changing the World.” Why? Because Sterling is the founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, a toy company that is making Sterling’s mission a reality.
After graduating, Sterling started researching everything from childhood development to gender roles. She discovered that in order to gain interest in and pursue a given field, a person must be exposed to the right inputs at an early age. This fact became particularly bothersome as Sterling became more and more familiar with the contents of the average toy aisle in stores. Toys for girls were in the pink aisle, dominated by dolls, stuffed animals, and princesses, whereas toys for boys were found in the blue aisle, filled with macho action figures, various toy weapons, and a huge variety of building block sets. Most experts agree that the toys served up to young girls do little to encourage an interest in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math). This knowledge led Sterling to develop a plan to create a different kind of toy for girls.
As she began developing ideas for toys, another research finding struck her—girls possess stellar verbal skills and tend to learn better by interacting with stories. That insight was instrumental in the creation of the GoldieBlox line of construction sets. Part erector set and part storybook, the combination was designed to engage girls through their verbal skills and encourage them to build through narratives that feature the adventures of Goldie, a freckled-faced blonde girl donning overalls and a tool belt. Although Goldie comes off as a bit of a tomboy, she’s still girlish. Skinny, blonde, and cute, she favors pinks and purples. The toys and stories feature animals and ribbons, and characters are more likely to help others than to succeed on their own.
After her innovative toy sets received little interest at the American International Toy Fair in New York City, Sterling started her own company. That decision sparked more interest than she could have ever imagined. To raise the $150,000 needed for the first round of production, Sterling launched a Kickstarter crowd-sourced funding campaign. Her funding goal was reached in just four days, and the funding topped out at $285,000.
With little to spend on traditional advertising, Sterling first promoted her inventive toys with some YouTube ads, including “Princess Machine,” featuring young girls who take their stereotypically girly toys and create a sophisticated Rube Goldberg device. That video went viral to the tune of 8 million views in little more than a week. Shortly thereafter, GoldieBlox’s first two products became Amazon’s top two selling toys during the industry’s busiest month of December. And if all that wasn’t enough, GoldieBlox beat out 15,000 contenders in Intuit’s “Small Business Big Game” Super Bowl ad contest, winning a $4 million spot during the big game.
Today, only a few years after the launch of its first product, GoldieBlox’s toys are sold at Target, Toys”R”Us, Amazon, and 6,000 other retailers worldwide. The brand features dozens of play sets designed for girls ages 3 through 11, the Bloxtown interactive website and app, a collection of original music videos, a Goldie action figure, and a “More Than Just a Princess” line of T-shirts and hoodies. GoldieBlox has won numerous industry awards, and its toys have succeeded in raising awareness about the lack of women in technical and scientific fields as well as the issues associated with the traditional pink aisle.
With all this success, you would think that GoldieBlox would be heralded by anyone and everyone wanting to change gender-based stereotypes in toys. But GoldieBlox has sparked substantial debate over whether it is really helping the cause it claims to be serving. The opposition, led by many feminist voices, claims that GoldieBox’s approach is little more than window dressing. The debate got really ugly after the launch of GoldieBlox and the Parade Float, a construction set based on a new challenge faced by Goldie and her friends—to create a float to transport the winner of a beauty pageant. “You cannot create a toy meant to break down stereotypes when you start off with the ideal that ‘we know all girls love princesses,’” argues author Melissa Atkins Wardy. Those in the opposition camp call for toys that are gender-neutral. “When we use princess culture, pinkification, and beauty norms to sell STEM toys to girls and fool ourselves that we are amazing and progressive and raising an incredible generation of female engineers, we continue to sell our girls short,” says Wardy. Additionally, although the toys are designed to stir interest in girls by having them build and create, critics have raised concerns that GoldieBlox toys are too simplistic.
But Sterling is quick to respond to all such arguments and show that GoldieBlox isn’t just trying to hook parents with a gimmick that doesn’t deliver. “There’s nothing wrong with being a princess,” says the 32-year-old entrepreneur. “We just think girls can build their own castles too.” This idea is backed by many advocates who recognize that to disrupt the pink aisle, you can’t start out by trying to obliterate it.
To influence through play the types of hobbies and academic fields that women pursue, a company first must penetrate a very competitive market. Creating toys that are void of things that girls find appealing will only send girls scrambling for the nearest Bratz or Disney princess doll. GoldieBlox toys may incorporate traditional gender stereotypes, but they tweak and reframe them. GoldieBlox spent years researching gender differences, seeking significant input from Harvard neuroscientists, and observing children’s play patterns. “Our stories leverage girls’ advanced verbal skills to help develop and build self-confidence in their spatial skills,” Sterling asserts.
Besides, Sterling was just getting started. Today, the GoldieBlox portfolio is not only growing in number of play sets, it’s becoming more diverse with three new characters who have joined Goldie to create a team to which just about any girl can relate. There’s Ruby Rails, a popular African American girl who is a whiz at coding; Valentina Voltz, a Hispanic engineer; and Li Gravity, Goldie’s long-time neighbor and best friend who is an expert at physics who knows how to apply the laws of his favorite science, performing stunts with superhero-like precision. Together, these characters take girls on a variety of adventures that go way beyond princess escapades—such as skydiving, ziplining, and auto racing. Then there’s the “Invention Mansion,” the play set Sterling refers to as the “anti-dollhouse”—a 300-piece play set featuring a “Hacker Hideway” that can be figured and reconfigured into hundreds of different formats.
Whether or not the two sides to the debate will resolve their differences in trying to achieve the same goal, there is no question that GoldieBlox has taken the toy industry by storm. If the most recent annual North American International Toy Fair is any indication, a little GoldieBlox seems to have rubbed off on just about every other toy company. The first year that GoldieBlox set up its booth at the trade show, the tech toy section was a wasteland. Today, nearly every booth features STEM toys, robots, and a lot of not-so-pink products targeted at girls.
Although clearly motivated to put an end to the stereotypes that have long been generated by the toy and entertainment industries, Sterling makes it clear that the goal is to become a multiplatform character brand à la Disney. “We want to be the brand that kids are whining for.” If the next few years are anything like GoldieBlox’s first few, it’s easy to envision a new kind of toy aisle at the local supercenter—one that heavily features GoldieBlox’s multiplatform brand.
5-18 Of the factors that influence consumer behavior, which category or categories (cultural, social, personal, or psychological) best explain the existence of a blue toy aisle and a pink toy aisle? Why?
5-19 Choose the specific factor (for example, culture, family, occupation, attitudes) that most accounts for the blue/pink toy aisle phenomenon. Explain the challenges faced by GoldieBlox in attempting to market toys that “swim against the stream” or push back against the forces of that factor.
5-20 To what degree is GoldieBlox bucking the blue/pink toy aisle system?
5-21 If GoldieBlox succeeds at selling lots of its toys, will that accomplish the mission of increasing the presence of females in the field of engineering?
Sources: John Kell, “How Toy Startup GoldieBlox Made Diversity a Priority,” Fortune, April 1, 2016, www.fortune.com/2016/04/01/goldieblox-toy-startup-diversity/; “Hottest Toys of 2016: On the Ground with GoldieBlox at the Toy Fair,” GeekGirlRising, www.geekgirlrising.com/hottest-toys-of-2016-focus-on-steam-ggr-and-goldieblox-on-the-ground-at-ny-toy-fair/, accessed June, 2016; Katy Waldman, “GoldieBlox: Great for Girls? Terrible for Girls? Or Just Selling Toys?” Slate, November 26, 2013, www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/26/goldieblox_disrupting_the_pink_aisle_or_just_selling_toys.html; Jennifer Reingold, “Watch Out Disney: This Toy Startup’s Coming for You,” Fortune, November 26, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/11/26/goldieblox-toy-startup/; and information from www.goldieblox.com, accessed June 2016.
Go to mymktlab.com for Auto-graded writing questions as well as the following Assisted-graded writing questions:
5-22 Explain the stages of the consumer buyer decision process and describe how you or your family went through this process to make a recent purchase.
5-23 Discuss how lifestyle influences consumers’ buying behavior and how marketers measure lifestyle.
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