Consumer Behavior
By John Miller
()
About this ebook
To propose an offer in line with the expectations of a target public and know how to value it in a highly competitive environment, it is essential to know it well. It is to respond to this concern that research into the behavior of consumer. This science constitutes a relatively young discipline since it is at the beginning of the fifties in the united states that one can locate the first stammerings of its current form.
To meet such a challenge, the study of consumer behavior must have a broadly multidisciplinary approach. It must mobilize economic reflection, but also the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or even quantitative disciplines such as mathematical modeling or applied statistics.
In this book, it has been deliberately decided to focus exclusively on the individual consumer. Organizational, professional or industrial purchases, even if they present a certain number of dimensions which are found in what we will be able to say, nevertheless have enough important specificities (purchasing centers, adequacy of the personal interests of the buyer and organizational of the company which employs him…) to be the subject of developments which must be specific to them.
Read more from John Miller
Real Estate: From Disruption to Maturity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreen Finance: A Reflection on the Myth of Green Finance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReal Estate in 2025 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPESTEL Analysis: Ensure the Continuity of Your Business In 50 minutes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEco-ethical Investment: Investing your Money Intelligently Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhilosophy of Management Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA World History of Economic Warfare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSymbiotic Economy :Regeneration of the Economy, Planet, and Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOil: The Decline is Near Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEthics and Business: Hands Down on the City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Americans: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdvertising in the New World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStop Overthinking: Learn to Eliminate Overthinking in 10 Days Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Italian Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVincent Almighty Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat Effective Traders Act and Think: Underlying Principles and Winning Strategies for Trading Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToxic Person: The Moment I Knew I was the Toxic Person Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEconomics of the Common Good the Pandemic and the Market Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrading Ethics in Economics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSuccessful Business Development: How to find and retain your customers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Admired History of France Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Stop Overthinking: Clear Your Mind, Get Rid of Negative Thoughts, and Find Inner Peace Using Meditation and Minimalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Search for Dirty Money Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapitalism: How our Social Organization Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEthical Waltz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings60 Laws of Success: Laws of Success in Difficult Situations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trade of Promises Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Consumer Behavior
Related ebooks
The Real Deal...Public Opinion, PR, Advertising Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConsumed: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Improving Sustainable Tourism in XXIst Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Soul of the New Consumer (Review and Analysis of Windham and Orton's Book) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and Techniques for Market Researchers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLuxury, Lies and Marketing: Shattering the Illusions of the Luxury Brand Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmail List Building On A Budget Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRole of Social Marketing in Social Enterprises: The Case of Gawle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdvertising in the New World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Edward L. Bernays's Propaganda Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Conscious Consumerism Movement: Creating Change Through Your Purchases Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrand Strategies How to Connect Consumer’s Experience And Marketing Process Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Bottom Line: Unfortunate Side Effects of Capitalist Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Entrepreneur: The Economic Function of Free Enterprise Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEconomy with Karma Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarketing 3.0 (Review and Analysis of Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan's Book) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Introduction to Marketing - Principles of Wholesale and Retail Distribution Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Conscious Investing: Practitioners' views on holistic investing approaches that benefit people and the planet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarketing:All You Need to Know about Marketing A Comprehensive Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLectures and Essays II: 1987 - 1996 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBounded Rationality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManaging Customers Through Economic Cycles Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Microeconomics of Wellbeing and Sustainability: Recasting the Economic Process Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Resilient Cultural Organisation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFifty Economic Fallacies Exposed (Revised) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inversed Marketing Mastery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRethinking Globalization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExchanging Autonomy: Inner Motivations as Resources for Tackling the Crises of Our Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Business For You
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed: The Definitive Book on Value Investing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Beautiful Questions: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Write a Grant: Become a Grant Writing Unicorn Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Emotional Intelligence: Exploring the Most Powerful Intelligence Ever Discovered Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 3rd Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Carol Dweck's Mindset The New Psychology of Success: Summary and Analysis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robert's Rules Of Order Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Everything Guide To Being A Paralegal: Winning Secrets to a Successful Career! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Law of Connection: Lesson 10 from The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, 20th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Set for Life: An All-Out Approach to Early Financial Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capitalism and Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat: The BRRRR Rental Property Investment Strategy Made Simple Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Consumer Behavior
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Consumer Behavior - John Miller
CHAPTER 1
The importance of understanding the consumer
We cannot understand how essential it is for an organization – and above all for a company – to have a perfect knowledge of the audiences on which it depends if we do not integrate the fact that they are at the center of all actions taken. Understanding a consumer who is constantly changing means calling on very different disciplines. Some of them may have dominated the reflection at a certain moment but, in the end, it is a multidisciplinary perspective which seems to be the most promising explanatory approach. This development reflects the importance of learning factors in consumer behavior, but also the result of multiple variables, both internal and environmental or cultural, which permanently guide the processes mobilized.
I The consumer at the center of organizations' concerns
Consumers are, for the company, vital agents because it is they who constitute the essential guarantee of its profit. To survive in a hyper-competitive environment, an organization must know how to bring to the targeted target a higher perceived value than its competitors; the consumer value can be defined as the difference between all the perceived advantages ( utilitarian or symbolic ) provided by a product (taken in its broadest sense) and the cost (in money, time and effort) necessary for the to acquire and to fully enjoy it.
EXAMPLE
Owning a car can bring many and varied benefits depending on the vehicle and the personal relationship that an individual will have with it: freedom of transport, positive image with those around you, social status, comfort, pleasure... Receiving these benefits presupposes however, to accept counterparties such as the need to pay for the car, fuel, insurance, maintenance, parking, or such as the acceptance of contributing to the process of pollution, of wasting time in traffic jams, of finding his scratched car in the parking lot of a hypermarket...
It would be illusory to hope to propose a relevant offer for a market segment (and above all to give credibility in its eyes to the good match between offer and expectations), without a perfect knowledge of the individuals who make it up and of the logic underlying their actions. .
One of the first arbitrations in marketing consists in choosing, among all the segments that make up a market, the one or those that we want to focus on and which one(s) we want to address. To constitute an acceptable target, a segment must be made up of individuals whose fundamental expectations remain very close to each other in order to be able to set up effective actions and communication. It must also be large enough in volume to ensure an acceptable level of profitability. It is therefore necessary to be able to grasp all of the motivations of consumers, to group them into homogeneous entities, to describe the groups thus formed and to select the one (or those) who will have (have) a good chance of granting the value to the company's offer.
Another fundamental decision lies in the positioning : what position to have in the minds of consumers to stand out from competitors? What reality do we want to represent for him? For a brand, being associated with a clear position has two advantages: differentiating itself from competing offers and protecting itself from possible attacks. A successful positioning will closely associate the brand with one or two benefits which, if they correspond to the expectations of the targeted target, will make it very difficult for others to appropriate and give credibility to these same benefits.
EXAMPLE 1
A biscuit manufacturer has designed a new product. It exists physically (texture, shape, taste, colour, etc.) but its reality for consumers will depend on its association with consumption times (breakfast, appetite suppressant, dessert, snack for children, etc.) and specific benefits. (taste, practicality, nutritional character, etc.).
EXAMPLE 2
Plizz and O'Cedar, two technically very similar dust remover brands, have created very different consumer identities: Plizz has played on the two advantages efficiency
and no effort
while O'Cedar has become "the wood and parquet specialist.
Knowing the consumer, his expectations and the logic of his decision-making process is also crucial to ensure the success of the actions implemented.
With regard to the product, for example, it would be very dangerous not to question the reactions to novelty, the sensitivity and loyalty to the brand or even the feeling in relation to different shapes or different colors of packaging . . It is also important to know price sensitivity, the memorized elements that will activate reference prices or the link with perceived quality. For distribution, you need to know where the target buys, how it behaves at the point of sale (time spent, circuit inside the store, information viewed, etc.). Finally, one cannot communicate with a group of consumers without knowing their habits vis-à-vis television, their surfing on the Internet, the press titles they read, the discourse to which they are sensitive, the values in which they recognizable, humor appreciated...
And when the actions are launched, it would be illusory to believe that the analysis of consumer behavior is over. Because controlling the monitoring of operations in progress, countering the strategy of competitors and anticipating changes in the cognitive, attitudinal or behavioral responses of consumers presupposes the existence of a permanent watch.
II Needs and motivations
1. Needs
We have to dispel a preconceived idea: marketing does not create needs! Whether we consider them innate or as the result of lived experiences, it is a concept located at a level too deep for marketing techniques to act directly on it. On the other hand, they can, if priority needs are detected among consumers, serve as a support to create in the group something more artificial and more ephemeral: a desire. At best, they can awaken a need that existed in a latent state. Desire can thus be defined as being the culturally learned expression of a need: an American and an Indian who are hungry will not look for the same foods to satisfy this need because their respective learning about taste has led them to different paths. The need for prestige existed in the same way as today in ancient Egypt or in the Middle Ages, but the means of satisfying it were obviously very different.
It is ridiculous to speak of a need for a smartphone. If it would be very difficult to do without it today, it is because it represents a solution perceived as superior to the others for satisfying a need for prestige, freedom or sensations. Behind the same object, all consumers do not buy the same thing. In one case, we will give credibility to the social recognition that the possession of this product at the start of its life cycle is likely to bring to its owner; in the second, we will insist on the possibility of being able to carry out in a nomadic way all the operations that can be carried out at the same time with a telephone and a computer connected to the Internet; finally in the third, we will focus on the quality of images and sound related to digital recording. Without the detection of a need that acts as a driving force (utilitarian or hedonistic), attempts to sell a good will be in vain. You don't make someone – even the very rich – buy a very ostentatious luxury car if the automobile is only a necessary evil for him to get from point A to point B.
Among the proponents of the innate nature of needs, we find Maslow (1970), who groups them into a hierarchical integration comprising five levels: physiological needs (drinking, eating, sleeping, etc.), the need for security, the need to belong ( to a group), the need for esteem (to be recognized by others in society), the need for self-fulfilment (through sport, the arts, etc.). According to him, an individual seeks to satisfy a level N need only if those of level N-1 are already satisfied. High-ranking needs, however, can never be permanently satisfied, because the individual would then be led to inaction.
This theory is however opposed by ethnologists, who point out that in certain so-called primitive societies, this hierarchy of needs is not always respected. Indeed, it is not uncommon for individuals to starve themselves there in return for seemingly futile satisfactions for us. It nevertheless underlines what is covered by the concept of need.
Since the work of Murray (1938), other classifications than that of Maslow have been proposed. But none has a universal guarantee. It is therefore advisable, as a precaution, to carry out a preliminary exploratory study to identify the needs that may underlie consumer behavior in the face of a given category of good.
2. From needs to motivations
Motivation is first and foremost the result of the activation of a need. It constitutes a force which leads the individual to act. It is born to put in place a strategy aimed at reducing a noticeable discrepancy perceived, consciously or not, between a current state and a desired state.
The first works to take this concept into account are obviously of psychoanalytical essence. We know that, according to this vision, the individual, under the pressure of the impulses which direct him, is permanently in search of a balance between the three dimensions which are the ego, the id and the superego . When this precarious stability is threatened, he develops a defense mechanism of his ego, and for that, sets up motivational forces (repression of an impulse, transformation of this one to make it coherent...).
The Austrian Ernst Dichter (1964) is the one who has contributed the most to applying these theories in the field of consumption. He has thus formalized many motivations, showing for example that through the smell of the cigar, men first seek to manifest their masculinity, or that individuals who refuse to eat prunes (a wrinkled fruit) express a fear of old age.
However, you have to be vigilant and keep the right level of analysis for marketing. In a study by the firm Feedback pour Nous Deux , a first level of discourse showed that female readers bought the magazine for the legal section (less than half a page!). In-depth interviews had revealed a