home Marketing Basics of Marketing - Kotler Philip

Basics of Marketing - Kotler Philip

The model of consumer behavior

In the past, market leaders learned to understand their customers in the process of daily trading with them. However, the growth in the size of firms and markets deprived many marketing managers of direct contacts with their customers. Managers have to resort increasingly to consumer research. They spend more, than ever before, on studying consumers, trying to find out who exactly buys, how they buy, when they buy, where they buy and why they buy.

The main question: how do consumers react to different incentives marketing, which the company can apply? A company that really understands how consumers react to different product characteristics, prices, advertising arguments, etc., will have a huge advantage over competitors. That's why both firms and scientists spend so much effort on researching the dependencies between the drivers of marketing and the response of consumers. The starting point of all these efforts is the simple model shown in Fig. 30. It shows that the motivating factors of marketing and other stimuli penetrate into the "black box" of the buyer's consciousness and cause certain responses.

Fig. 30. A simple model of consumer behavior

In Fig. 31 the same model is presented in a more detailed form. In the left-hand rectangle, there are two types of incentives. The motivating factors of marketing include four things: goods, price, methods of distribution and incentives. Other stimuli are composed of basic forces and events from the environment of the buyer; Economic, scientific, technical, political and cultural environment. Passing through the "black box" of the buyer's mind, all these stimuli trigger a series of observable customer reactions represented in the right rectangle: product selection, brand selection, dealer selection, purchase time selection, purchase volume selection.

Fig. 31. An expanded model of consumer behavior

The task of the market leader is to understand what is happening in the "black box" of the consumer's consciousness between the arrival of stimuli and the manifestation of responses to them. The "black box" itself consists of two parts. The first - the characteristics of the buyer, having a major influence on how a person perceives stimuli and reacts to them. The second part is the process of making a purchasing decision, on which the result depends. In this chapter, we will look at both of these parts to understand the buying behavior.