Understanding Consumer Behavior: The Key to Effective Marketing Strategies (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to Solve It Like A Marketer. This episode we are answering the question, what is consumer behavior? Now consumer behavior is at the heart of any successful marketing strategy. It begins with understanding why and how consumers behave the way that they do. Ultimately it's about examining consumers as they go through what's called the purchase decision process. Now this involves analyzing consumers as they choose, use, and dispose of products and services. Factors include consumers emotional and psychological states of mind and their behavioral responses. Consumer behavior is made up of several different disciplines including psychology, sociology, chemistry, and even neuroscience just to name a few. So let's look at how all of this fits together. At the center of this chart we see the purchase decision process and for this video that's what we're going to focus on. As marketers we need to understand this concept first before dealing with the consumers internal psychological or external sociocultural and situational influences. Those as you can see here are the factors that affect the buying process but I'm going to be doing more videos on that later on. So there are five stages to the purchase decision process. Problem recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision, and post purchase behavior. Problem recognition occurs when a consumer becomes aware of a need or want that is lacking and this could be as simple as running out of toothpaste and needing to buy more or it could be a want triggered by a marketing effort. For instance I really want that new iPad. In the information search stage the consumer searches for options to satisfy that need or want and this could be an internal search scanning their own memory to recall previous experience. For instance I usually buy Colgate toothpaste from the pharmacy that's what I'll go with again or an external search by asking friends, colleagues, turning to social media for instance for answers. In the alternative evaluation stage the consumer may consider other brands, compare prices, complexity of use, and reliability and this stage comes into play usually when you're making a larger purchase such as a new computer. Next comes the purchase decision itself. Now this stage can be influenced not only by product alternatives but possible incentives that are offered by the seller. Two key questions the consumer may ask themselves is when do I buy and from whom do I buy. And finally we have post-purchase behavior and this sometimes gets forgotten but is really important in today's market. In this stage the consumer may feel anxiety or psychological tension especially if it was a significant purchase like a computer. Did they make the right choice? And this tension is termed cognitive dissonance and often results from businesses competing for the consumers attention such as Mac versus PC. It's essential that the marketer address these fears for instance by having a strong customer service follow-up policy and marketing efforts that target not only those thinking of buying but those who have already bought. Now I hope you can see just how important consumer behavior is to your marketing efforts and this video only scratches the surface. My challenge to you is to think about your product or service and the stages that a consumer goes through to choose you over competing brands. Think like a consumer. Go through these stages of the purchase decision process and see if objectively you would choose you. Also how do you address post-purchase behavior? If you can solve that then you have loyal customers for life. If you have questions for me would like to suggest a topic please do write your ideas in the comment section below. How did you find this challenge for instance? If you'd like to see more videos please hit the subscribe button. We'll see you every week with new videos so please stay tuned and let's solve it like a marketer.