(Some) Notes from
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
"Marketing planning requires that peoples needs as citizens as well as their needs as consumers be considered"
"The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantics. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer"
In November of 1970, Washington State voted on whether or not to impose a 5 cent deposit on aluminum cans in an effort to clean up the environment. The vote was 52% against imposing the deposit. The public would rather throw the cans in the trash than recycle them. This is only one of many studies that demonstrate certain "nearsighted" attitudes about the world at large.
Some people demonstrate characteristics that can be grouped in terms of gratification. Instant Gratification, Substitute Gratification, Delayed Gratification, and Suspended Gratification.
Instant Gratification. When someone goes to great lengths and expense beyond one's means to satisfy a need, usually resulting in debt, or imprisonment.
Substitute Gratification: When one overindulges in one means of satisfaction to compensate for the lack of satisfaction in another need. Overeating, drinking alcohol, or other substance abuse. Usually, the Love / Esteem need is the culprit and the sickness of overindulgence in the food need becomes a welcome distraction. This usually results in debt or poverty, and stagnation in social mobility from the expenses incurred. The habit of substitution becomes the norm. "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" becomes the slogan, and Acid Reflux evolves from a side-effect of overindulgence to a "real" illness.
Thirst and hunger seem to be two different needs. Some people have a tendency to not recognize that they are only thirsty, and they feel compelled to eat something instead of just drinking water. Some "substituters" actually say that water is "boring." Yet they don't realize the cumulative expenses incurred by the purchase of soda, coffee, tea, or alcoholic beverages.
Delayed Gratification: Requires that one understands what is really happening inside, the discipline and patience to wait it out, and the ability to foresee the long term consequences of the choices one makes when one finally decides to satisfy the need.
Suspended Gratification: Sudden uncontrollable poverty that causes one to reevaluate habits and expenses. My wake-up call. The inability to satisfy any needs outside of basic physiological needs.
"We tend to respond to new situations the way we did to similar past situations."
We perceive only what we want to perceive.
| Internal Perception Guidance | External Stimulus Factors |
| Our needs, moods, and expectations determine the direction of our perception. | Contrast, Size, Color, Movement, Surroundings |
Internal Perception Guidance: Our Attitudes
| COMPONENTS OF AN ATTITUDE | |
| Cognitive component | The package of beliefs the individual has about an object |
| Affective Component | The feeling component relates to the emotional aspects of the attitude. The emotions that are connected with the object--ranging from hate, dislike, don't care, like, love, etc. The feeling-tone. |
| Action Tendency | The potential readiness to respond. Unreliable because people tend to misattribute stimuli to items more immediate in their environment. Beating spouses and children for unrelated problems at work, slamming a door because your mad at something that happened elsewhere, Anti-Semitism, Racism. Components of misattribution often overwhelm an accurate measure of action tendency. Something else usually is the motivation behind finally buying the product. |
| Multiplexity |
The number of abstractions contained within each component. Cars for example:
|
| Salience | Any attitude toward a product or brand is the result of a number of attitudes toward each of the products attributes such as price, appearance, flavor, and performance. |
| Development | Family influence, Peer, Group, Class, Culture, Aggregate, and Personality. |
Attitude: Function and Nature
| Daniel Katz | Attitudes function in the service of dissonance reduction, reducing needs and tension; maximizing reward and minimizing penalties. |
| Utilitarian Function | The consumer develops favorable attitudes toward objects in his world which are associated with the satisfaction of his needs, and unfavorable attitudes toward objects which frustrate him or punish him. |
| Ego Defensive Function | Protection of our self image. Example: When we cannot admit to ourselves that we have deep feelings of inferiority, we may project those feelings onto some convenient minority group and bolster our own feelings by attitudes of superiority. |
| Value Expression Function | Deriving satisfaction by expressing an attitude that reflects central values. Tattoos, body piercing, clothing style, hair style, etc. |
| Knowledge Function | Attitudes used as a frame of reference; to distinguish from good and bad. |
| Martin Fishbein | An attitude consists of two components: Beliefs about the attributes of the object, and evaluation of the beliefs. |
The Personality
| Milton Rokeach's The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1960) | ||
| Component | Open Minded (Pragmatist) | Closed Minded (Dogmatist) |
| Opposing Beliefs | Tests and verifies all information | High Magnitude of rejection of opposing beliefs. |
| External Authority | Critical and suspicious of authority | Greater Dependency on external authority in his opinions and attitudes. |
| Context of Messages | Divides the meaning of the messenger from the meaning of the message. | Draws added conclusions from the sum of the message and the messenger. Unable to distinguish between the two. |
"Individuals low in Dogmatism were more likely to be innovators
in adopting new brands of products and more likely to use environment-friendly
products."--Milton Rokeach
| Perceived Risk: | |
| Narrow Categorizer | Broad Categorizer |
| Prefers the risk of reacting and possibly being wrong. | Prefers the risk of not reacting and possibly being wrong |
| Women both young and old, and young men. | Older men. |
| Risk can be reduced either by decreasing the possible consequences or increasing the certainty of the possible outcome. | High risk perceivers were more brand loyal, tended to avoid being among the first persons to try a new product, switched brands less often, were more likely to seek information, and more likely to respond to information they had sought. |
The Attribution Process by which we develop our "Preparatory Set" of expectations.
| Stimulus Response, or learning theory. See also Operant Conditioning | |
| Distinctiveness | The impression or causality is attributed to the thing if it uniquely occurs when the thing is present. |
| Consistency over Time | Each time the thing is present, the individuals reaction must be the same, or nearly so. |
| Consistency over Modality | His reactions must be consistent even though his mode of interaction with the thing varies. (For example: A detergent is seen to be very effective for washing white and colored clothes, dishes and silverware, walls, floors, automobiles, and paint brushes.) |
| Consensus | Attributes of external origin are experienced in the same way by all observers. A two-step process: Attributions first must be made about the others who are communicating information to him, before he can make his attributes. Opinion leaders, reference groups, family, etc. |
| An important force that determines consumer behavior |
|
Common mistakes of perception: Interference from our attitudes
| Preparatory Set | Some of the selectivity in perception is due to the expectation or "set" the perceiver holds. This is a problem among track runners who, lined up for an event, hear a cough, a movement, or rustle, and misperceive the sound as the starting pistol. | ||||||
| Perceptual Defense |
|
||||||
| Proximity | Things near each other tend to be perceived as belonging together. For example, while shopping, one sees a well-known brand at a lower than normal price. Many people tend to assume that other items in close proximity are relatively similar bargains. Stores now intersperse bargain items among items which have a higher prices, which when sold, make up for the artificially low price of the bargain items. | ||||||
| Similarity | Similar things tend to be perceived as belonging together. Sometimes referred to as "guilt by association." The example from the book which was written in 1972, is "All students with beards and long hair are perceived as radical revolutionaries about to destroy property. Another example would be that you probably thought about obesity when I made earlier statements about overindulgence and substitute gratification. The common mistake of assuming that all overweight people overindulge. | ||||||
| Continuity | Stimuli that form a complete or symmetrical figure or good form tend to be grouped as part of a whole. People often feel compelled to complete the form. The images of the Virgin Mary on toast, or stain on the wall of a highway underpass, cloud formations that look like familiar things, and incomplete slogans like "MISSION...", "Where's the...", "You can take Salem out of the country, but...".("you can't take the country out of Salem.") | ||||||
| Context | The environment or setting of an object. Often a concern of advertisers because of accusations of influence peddling. A product was rated higher because it was placed in a prestigious magazine. The same product was rated lower when it was published in a pulp fiction magazine. When a whole ham was divided in half and one half was labeled with a well known brand name, and the other half was labeled as generic, the well known brand was perceived to be of better quality. | ||||||
| Abstractions |
|
||||||
| Optical or Geometric Illusions | Changes in the shapes of products over time provide clues. Product labels over time have changed from square shapes to more round shapes, and most now have broken circles as package decorations or part of their logo. Whole labels have been reduced in size along with other referent items like the bottle's twist off cap, and the overall package now has a distorted shape that, thirty years ago would have been considered wasted shipping space. |
A golf enthusiast will be more attracted to to an ad for golf balls in in Time magazine rather than Golf Digest because he will be unable to pay equal attention to the entire spectrum of stimuli in the special interest magazine.
External influences
| Types of Influences | Definitions |
| Significative | The actual presence of the product |
| Symbolic | Advertisement of the product |
| Social | Messages from family, reference groups, and social class |
| Info Sources | Personal (Social) | Impersonal |
| Commercial |
|
|
| Non-Commercial |
|
|
| Marketing Mix: Information Cues About a Product: | Quality, Price, Distinctiveness, Service, Availability |
| Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility | Purchasing too many of the same item, from ties and shoes, to steak dinners, becomes boring and even repugnant. This law was blown out of the water by Imelda Marcos who collected thousands upon thousands of pairs of shoes. |
Communication functions and failures
| Process Fluency (The "Sleeper-Effect") |
Process Fluency is the ease with which you remember a message. A message repeated often enough will resonate in your memory. Over time*, the information about the source of the message will fade, but the message itself will remain. Because the source of the message no longer exists, the incredulity of the message also no longer exists. You begin to believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, when in fact there was absolutely no connection between the two. Or you believe that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, when it fact, he did not. *(4 weeks, according to a study by Hoveland and Weiss, p. 90) |
| One-sided Communication (Brand X) | Two-Sided Communication (Brand X versus Brand Y) usually stated as "other" |
| Subjects in favor of the advocated position were influenced more | Subjects originally hostile to the advocated position were more effectively influenced |
| Subjects opposed to the advocated position were not influenced | More educated audiences are more influenced |
| Less educated audiences are more influenced. | More effective protection against counter-propaganda or counter-communication |
| Counter-communication will completely erase the effectiveness of a one-sided communication | Design the ad as an immunizing agent against counter-communication |
| More effective in maintaining the belief level when a counterattack is likely to follow. |
| The Greater the Change Advocated - The Greater the Change Produced - To a point of opposition where there is no change, and then a "boomerang" effect. | ||
| Change | No Change | Boomerang Effect |
| Innovative new products | Soap, Tooth paste, Mustard, Etc. (private items) | "Surrender Leaflets", "Social Security Reform". (public items) Appeals to non-conforming behavior. |
| The effectiveness of change in attitude appears to be related to perceived risk. Fear of being accused of treason is different from being mocked or ignored. | ||
Consistency is so pervasive that inconsistency appears dramatic. Attitude change comes about in the effort to seek consistency.
| Fear Tactics | Not using a particular brand (usually a personal hygiene product) will lead to most dreadful consequences related to health, social status, and social appeal. |
| Persuadability | Seems to be related to low self-esteem, hostility and aggressiveness, perceptual dependence upon others, submissiveness, social isolation, lower intelligence levels, and women more than men. |
| Cognitive Dissonance (Being Psychologically Uncomfortable) | Janis and Feshbach found that the stronger the fear induced in an audience, the less subjects adhered to the recommendations on the film. (p. 92) Possibly a function of perceptual defense. Most people tend not to ponder their own mortality, safety concerns, or long term goals, or things which cause cognitive dissonance. |
|
will motivate a person to try to reduce dissonance by
doing the following:
|
|
| A. Eliminating or reevaluating one of the cognitive elements, or his responsibility, or control over the act or decision. | |
| B. Information can be denied or distorted or forgotten in the service of dissonance reduction. | |
| C. Minimizing the importance of the issue or decision that led to the dissonant state. | |
| D. New cognitive elements can be added to support the decision. (Actively seek info for rationalization). |
Group Influence
Flow of Information: Mass Media ==>Opinion Leaders ==> Followers
|
Cultural products such as buildings, robes, prayers, magic formula,
songs, etc. |
In one study, only 25% of the subjects were able to defy group norms in favor of contrary physical evidence.
| Reference Group | Groups which serve as comparison points |
| Groups to which man aspires | |
| Groups whose perspectives are assumed by the individual | |
| He may only adopt some beliefs and behaviors or he may emulate an individual. |
| Cultures | Tradition Directed | Inner Directed | Other Directed |
| Slow to change | Rapid Expansion | Strong need to get along well with others | |
| Dependence on family and kin organizations | Gain feelings of control over their own lives | Concerned less with what they are and what they do | |
| Low social mobility | See themselves as individuals | Concentrate on what others think of them | |
| Tight web of values | Consume for the sake of status and prestige - as a pathway to success. |
The perception that anything is popular is an affective tool of persuasion.
Popularity, Prestige, and Power
| Self Concept | There is a greater probability for positive evaluation and ownership if there is a congruence between the symbolic image of the product and the image he holds of himself. |
| Beer Drinkers | Perceive themselves to be different from the self perception of their nonbeer drinking peers. |
| Bandwagon Appeals Using Refrerence Groups in advertising. |
Influence both Brand and Product | Influence only Brand | Influence Neither Brand nor Product |
| Cigarettes, Beer, Cars, Handbags, Shoes. | Clothing, Furniture, Magazines, Refrigerators. | Soap, Canned Peaches, Radios. | |
| Public Exposure level: Fear of being seen not conforming to group values. (Perceived risk) | Initial First Public Impression. Uncontrollable public exposure. High motivation for expression of compliance. | Secondary Invitational semiprivate exposure. Risk of appearing non-compliant is somewhat controllable | No expected exposure. Protected by "Reasonable expectation of privacy." |
The Messenger: The "Change Agent"
| Attitude Changers | ||
| Public Relations Advertisers Churches |
NAACP ADL Government |
ACLU Political Action Committees (PAC) |
| The most influential change agents are the groups to which an individual belongs or aspires to belong. | ||
The influence of others on conformity to group values has been
heavily researched and is effective in advertising.
| Factors Relevant to behavior and attitude change |
| The voice |
|
Mannerisms |
| Accent |
| Reputation |
| Occupation |
| Mode of Presentation |
Social Stratification is Universal
Class and Culture
| Warner's Six Class System (Professor W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago) | |
| Upper-Upper | The benefits of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Byrn Mawr, Radcliffe, Vassar; Executive positions in family businesses. Carnagie, Rockefeller, Roosevelt, etc. |
| Lower-Upper | Turner, Trump, Walton, Skilling, Lay, Ebers, Achievers |
|
Upper-Middle |
Doctors, Dentists, Lawyers, CPA's. Emulators |
| Lower-Middle | Supervisors, non-manegerial white-collar workers, small business owners, etc. Belongers |
| Upper-Lower | Most often referred to as the Working Class. In 1972 it was 40% of the population. In 2005 it is 60% of the population. Skilled, semi-skilled, and manual laborers. Unlike the lower middle class, they tend not to use their income to strive for middle-class "respectability". Also Belongers. |
| Lower-Lower | Unemployed, underemployed, or on some form of public releif program. Some retired earning only Social Security, Some Survivors and Sustainers |
| The retail structure carries social class or social prestige characteristics,...the "right" store is very important to the middle class consumer. | |
"Magazines that carry a large number of emotional stories are most likely to be found in the working class homes. Many of the house and garden variety of magazine, such as House Beautiful, are more likely to be read by the middle-classes. Some magazines such as New Yorker, are almost exclusively read by the upper and upper-middle classes. Most magazines make periodic reader studies and the advertisers should know the social class the medium is reaching before using it." (p. 120)
Bennett, Peter D.; Kassarjian, Harold H.; Consumer Behavior. Foundation of Marketing Series ©1972 Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. ISBN 0-13-169383-2