Consumer Behavior

By John Miller

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Apr 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215577134

Book preview

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