1.
Social factors:
Group
- 3 common groups:
+ Membership groups: have a direct influence and to which a person
belongs (family)
+ Reference groups: Have you ever found yourself comparing yourself
to another group of people or another group in society? “groups
that form a comparison or reference in forming attitudes or
behavior.”
+ Aspirational group: groups to which an individual wishes to belong
(celebrities you admire)
Word-of-mouth influence
- Word-of-mouth influence can have a powerful impact on consumer
buying behavior. The personal words and recommendations of trusted
friends, family, associates, and other consumers tend to be more
credible than those coming from commercial sources, such as
advertisements or salespeople
- Most word-of mouth influence happens naturally: Consumers start
chatting about a brand they use or feel strongly about one way or the
other. Often, however, rather than leaving it to chance, marketers can
help to create positive conversations about their brands
- opinion leaders—people within a reference group who, because of
special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exert
social influence on others. Some experts call this group the influentials
or leading adopters. When these influentials talk, consumers listen.
- Buzz marketing involves enlisting or even creating opinion leaders to
serve as “brand ambassadors” who spread the word about a company’s
products
- Over the past several years, a new type of social interaction has
exploded onto the scene—online social networking. online social
networks are Online social communities—blogs, online social media,
brand communities, and other online forums—where people socialize or
exchange information and opinions.
Family:
- family is the most important consumer-buying organization in society.
Family is the most important social group that affects consumer
behavior. These are the people who you live with and who are directly
impacted by and directly impact your consumer behavior. Marketers are
interested in the roles and influence of the husband, wife, and children
on the purchase of different products and services
- Husband–wife involvement varies widely by product category and by
stage in the buying process. Buying roles change with evolving
consumer lifestyles.
- Such shifting roles signal a new marketing reality. Marketers in
industries that have traditionally sold their products to only women or
only men—from groceries and personal care products to cars and
consumer electronics—are now carefully targeting the opposite sex.
modern family context. For example, in the United States, the wife
traditionally has been considered the main purchasing agent for the
family in the areas of food, household products, and clothing. But with
71 percent of all mothers now working outside the home and the
willingness of husbands to do more of the family’s purchasing, all this
has changed in recent years
- Children also have a strong influence on family buying decisions.
Furthermore, the majority of parents felt that their kids exert more
influence on family purchases than they did themselves when growing
up.
Roles and Status: A person belongs to many groups—family, clubs,
organizations, online communities. The person’s position in each group can
be defined in terms of both role and status. A role consists of the activities
people are expected to perform according to the people around them. Each
role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society
- So, as a student of marketing, you are expected to participate actively in
class, take part in competitions and webinars, and take up internships
and projects.
- As their child, your parents expect you to do well in your studies, get a
good job, and probably the traditional ‘settle down and have kids by 30’.
- As a part of a friend circle, you are expected to join your friends on the
occasional party night, throw a party on your own birthday, and spend
time with your friends.
- Similarly, everyone else also has multidimensional roles in society,
depending on who the role is in relation with. These roles are also a part
of the social factors affecting consumer behavior because most of the
time is spent by an individual on trying to successfully navigate each of
their roles.
Personal factors:
- Our tastes and preferences are sure to have changed over the years.
- Youth - younger than 18 years
Getting started - 18 to 35 years
Builders - 35 to 50 years
Accumulators - 50 to 60 years
Preservers - over 60 years
- During your youth, you are likely to have preferences similar to your
parents since you live with them and observe them closely. In this stage,
you were likely to consume instant noodles very rarely, and the brand
would have been the one your parents preferred.
- During the ‘getting started’ stage of life, you will get a higher education,
start a family, and settle down. In this phase, you are likely to
experiment more and try new things till you find the ones that best
satisfy your needs.
- Builders are likely to invest more in their children than themselves, thus
adapting themselves to their children’s preferences rather than their
own.
- Accumulators try to save money for their retirement period.
- Preservers are focused almost solely on health and related services.
-Economic: Consumers are not only getting more price-conscious but
also more value-conscious. They are only willing to pay for what they
expect they are getting from the product or service.
Companies are now focusing on making consumers believe that they are
paying less but getting more - more satisfaction and utility.
- Lifestyle: It measures a consumer’s AIOs (activities, interests, and
opinions) to capture information about a person’s pattern of acting and
interacting in the environment. It considers patterns of all the
interactions and actions a consumer has with the world.
Personality and Self-Concept:
- One researcher identified five brand personality traits: sincerity,
excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness
- Both an individual’s personality and the brand’s personality affect how
the consumer perceives the brand and ultimately interacts with it. If the
consumer and the brand have a similar personality, the consumer is very
likely to purchase its products and services and repeat them.
- If the brand represents something the consumer is neutral about, the
consumer may or may not be willing to try its products. But if the
consumer and the brand have opposing personalities, the consumer is
likely to never interact with the brand at all.
Psychological factors: humans move start from the bottom of the pyramid
and move in an upward direction.
- A person’s buying choices are further influenced by four major
psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and
attitudes.
- Motivation: A person tries to satisfy the most important need first.
When that need is satisfied, it will stop being a motivator, and the person
will then try to satisfy the next most important need. For example,
starving people (physiological need) will not take an interest in the
latest happenings in the art world (self-actualization needs) nor in how
they are seen or esteemed by others (social or esteem needs) nor even
in whether they are breathing clean air (safety needs). But as each
important need is satisfied, the next most important need will come into
play
- Perception: ‘perception’ as the process by which people select, organize,
and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world from
three perceptual processes:
Selective attention (the tendency for people to screen out most of the
information to which they are exposed)
Selective distortion (the tendency for people to interpret information
in a way that will support what they already believe)
Selective retention (the tendency to remember good points made
about a brand they favor and to forget good points about competing
brands)
- Learning’ refers to the changes in an individual’s behavior arising from
experience and occurs through interplay of drives, stimuli, cues,
responses, and reinforcement.
- ‘belief’ as a descriptive thought that a person has about something
based on knowledge, opinion, and faith
- attitudes describe a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings,
and tendencies toward an object or idea.
