Consumer Behavior free essay sample

The target audience for a drink like Gatorade is young adults. Following the research step of the consumer purchasing tree, the next step would be the process of decision-making from the consumers stand point, this will lead to the products ability to serve the customer in form of product availability and people around that may sway the decision-making. The availability of the product when the consumer wants it is also important, for this reason a marketer must consider the who, when, why and where in the consumers decision-making process. Consumer behavior can also be affected by many other factors that will be discussed throughout our report. The most important thing a marketer has to be to segment the market appropriately with a product like Gatorade you have so many other competitors like PowerAde and Vitamin Water, the marketer needs to know which groups of consumers are more likely to purchase this specific product. We will write a custom essay sample on Consumer Behavior or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In Gatorade’s case, the marketers are more likely to target men that are in to sports or men that want to consider themselves as big and strong. Gatorade also needs to determine the positioning of the product in the market in regards to its competitors, there are so many energy drinks out there that Gatorade needs to state how there drink is better than those offered by others. This can only be done by understanding the consumers of the drink and satisfying their wants and needs, so they don’t have to go elsewhere to get what they want and need. Motivation, ability and opportunity are very important aspects of the success for a drink like Gatorade. Motivation is what drives a consumer to take action; a person that is thirsty drives motivates a consumer to find a way to satisfy their thirst. In Gatorade’s case motivation does not take considerable behavior because Gatorade is not an expensive product and one can just go into practically any store and be able to find a bottle of Gatorade. One key factor that affects motivation when it comes to a product like Gatorade is its personal relevance on a consumer’s life, thus a consumer who is health-conscious will likely choose Gatorade because it has approximately 50 calories per 8-oz. erving. It generally comes in large portions, though, so a bottle will have 100 to 200 calories at most. The perceived risk can also determine if a Gatorade drink will be purchased or not, in this case a Gatorade drinker will not consider any of the attributes of the products to be risky; because the bottle contains all its nutritional facts so that lack of information cannot be applied, t he low price also make the product low risk, but one important aspect that may change it is the brand differentiation, â€Å"what makes Gatorade better than the competitors? †. This is the most important task marketers have to convince the buyer. â€Å"Since Gatorade is a product that is basically used to relieve thirst, consumers don’t have many factors that affect their abilities to process information about Gatorade and make decisions about and engage in its buying, usage, and disposition of the drink. The final factor affecting whether motivation results in action is a consumer’s opportunity to engage in a behavior. Time, distractions, and the amount, repetition, and control of information all affect a consumers’ opportunity to process information. Gatorade, like any other product, can be affected by the time pressures of consumers and distractions that might deter or delay them from purchasing a Gatorade bottle; but Gatorade has been successful in using many marketing communications and repeated advertisements to give consumers the opportunity to better learn about Gatorade          What current Gatorade consumers have already learned about previously is referred to as knowledge content. Gatorade has already reached a state in which many people know much about the product, their advertisements and how to shop for Gatorade products. Therefore, Gatorade consumers have high knowledge content about the products of the Gatorade brand. Gatorade has done a significant amount of work over the past couple of years to establish a well-known brand name and brand symbol. Most consumers recognize the brand symbol of a lightning bolt that is displayed in almost all Gatorade bottles. These consumers have also used some or most of Gatorade’s products more than one time. Consumers also need not only knowledge when purchasing a product but also need to use that knowledge to understand what matters the most to them. Consumers look for three essential qualifications when purchasing beverages: safety (expiration), efficiency (taste/flavor), and price/familiarity. Expiration dates don’t necessarily pertain to Gatorade drinks because the drinks have a high shelf life and almost always sell much prior to the expiration dates. However, in the case of an expiration date, blame would be based on the retailer to pull any expired food or beverage product off of their shelves. Taste plays a big role in consumer behavior because people want to drink things that taste good and are good for them. Gatorade offers an array of flavors for their consumers ranging from fruit punch to lemon to mango. The company had also stated from the launch in 1965 that the drinks have electrolytes making the drink provide you with a better performance for a workout. Familiarity is a quality that Gatorade has acquired over the years due to high knowledge content and positive feedback from consumers. Due to the high quality that Gatorade has provided over the years of great tasting beverages, consumers are familiar with the product and tend to repurchase the product. Gatorade has many different purposes but the main objective of Gatorade along with many other performance beverages is to quickly rehydrate one’s body effiecntly and quickly. Marketing has helped Gatorade grow it brand and most consumers tend to believe what is on the bottle without doing extreme research. One way to examine the validity of Gatorade’s claims is by examining experimental. As noted the research has confirmed that for the most part the claims made by Gatorade are true. However it is important to note that Gatorade is not needed for every workout and sometime water works better than Gatorade. What this research provides is a greater sense of satisfaction when a consumer purchases a Gatorade bottle; they believe their evaluations of what Gatorade will offer them will fulfill their needs. Customer satisfaction is important to Gatorade because satisfied customers are more likely to remain customers, be brand loyal, and be committed to the product. Several diversity influences affect consumer behavior, they include: age, gender, the region in which consumers live in, and among subgroups of individuals with unique patterns of ethnicity and religion because of their different traditions, customs, and preferences. Gatorade consumers are usually teens and Gen Y’ers, also known as millenniums. These consumers are media and tech savvy. Gatorade has created a website that has many interactive features; the website is designed to house a wealth of Gatorade-made video content which teens and Gen-Y’ers will spend hours pouring over. And like any other smart brand, Gatorade makes it possible to share the content they make on almost every conceivable platform, such as adding a video to a blog, a Facebook page, or a cell phone. When it comes to gender, Gatorade is marketed to both males and females. It is important to target female, as sports drinks are generally considered a masculine product and athletes are not skewed in terms of gender. Gatorade is also offered in any region where a consumer might live in, as well as to every consumer, regardless of ethnicity and religion. Gatorade was created in 1965 by medical researchers at the University of Florida; Gatorade was made to replenish the University of Florida’s Gators during practices and games. The bright yellow lemon juice and orange lid is a trademark of Gatorade which honors the University of Florida Gators football team. The football team credited Gatorade with their first Orange Bowl win over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in 1967. Since then Gatorade has been associated with sports, specifically football. Products need to have a symbolic role in consumer’s lives because it will greatly increase brand loyalty and repeat purchases. As a group we have realized that Gatorade has accomplished this in many ways. Since the product was introduced in 1965 many football teams have practice the ritual of the â€Å"Gatorade shower† at the end of the game, after a winning game football players grab a Gatorade cooler and dump it onto their coach. Symbolically Gatorade is viewed to many consumers as a special product that is apart in celebrating an athletic achievement. Companies use different marketing implications to achieve a role of symbolism in their products. However, Gatorade achieved its special status at the beginning of its time. The creation of Gatorade is based on true story that is aspiring and true; we believe that all these elements contribute to the symbolism and significance of the Gatorade drink. Gatorade hasn’t had any major lawsuits where their ethics and the social responsibility they have to society have come to question. Consumer Behavior free essay sample Consumer Behavior: Meeting Changes and Challenges LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter students should be able: 1. To understand what consumer behavior is and the different types of consumers. 2. To understand the relationship between consumer behavior and the marketing concept, the societal marketing concept, as well as segmentation, targeting, and positioning. 3. To understand the relationship between consumer behavior and customer value, satisfaction, trust and retention. 4. To understand how new technologies are enabling marketers to better satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. To understand how marketers are increasingly able to reach consumers wherever consumers wish to be reached. 6. To understand how the world’s economic condition is leading to consumption instability and change. 7. To understand the makeup and composition of a model of consumer behavior. 8. To understand the structure of this book. CHAPTER SUMMARY The study of consumer behavior enables marketers to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace; it is concerned not only with what consumers buy but also with why, when, where, and how they buy it. We will write a custom essay sample on Consumer Behavior or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Consumer research is the methodology used to study consumer behavior; it takes place at every phase of the consumption process: before the purchase, during the purchase, and after the purchase. The field of consumer behavior is rooted in the marketing concept, a business orientation that evolved in the 1950s through several alternative approaches, referred to, respectively, as the production concept, the product concept, and the selling concept. The three major strategic tools of marketing are market segmentation, targeting, and positioning. The marketing mix consists of a company’s service and/or product offerings to consumers and the pricing, promotion, and distribution methods needed to accomplish the exchange. Consumer behavior is interdisciplinary; that is, it is based on concepts and theories about people that have been developed by scientists in such diverse disciplines as psychology, sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and economics. Skilled marketers make the customer the core of the company’s organizational culture and ensure that all employees view any exchange with a customer as part of a customer relationship, not as a transaction. The three drivers of successful relationships between marketers and customers are customer value, high levels of customer satisfaction, and building a structure for customer retention. Digital technologies allow much greater customization of products, services, and promotional messages than do older marketing tools. They enable marketers to adapt the elements of the marketing mix to consumers’ needs more quickly and efficiently, and to build and maintain relationships with customers on a much greater scale. However, these technologies also represent significant challenges to marketers and to business models that have been used for decades. Consumer behavior has become an integral part of strategic market planning. The belief that ethics and social responsibility should also be integral components of every marketing decision is embodied in a revised marketing concept—the societal marketing concept—that calls on marketers to fulfill the needs of their target markets in ways that improve society as a whole. CHAPTER OUTLINE INTRODUCTION 1. Consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs. The sales orientation focus was to sell more of what the manufacturing department was able to produce. a) The orientation shifted from producing to selling. b) At some point, supply increasingly reached a point where it was greater than demand. c) The sales orientation began in the 1930s and extended to the 1950s. 4. In the mid-1950’s there was a shift from the sales orientation to the marketing orientation. a) Businesses realized the importance of focusing on consumers and their preferences. What Is The Marketing Concept *****Use Key Term marketing concept Here; Use Discussion Question #1 Here***** 1. The field of consumer behavior is rooted in a marketing strategy that evolved in the late 1950s. 2. Companies determined, that in order to be successful, they must determine the needs and wants of specific target markets and deliver the desired satisfactions better than the competition. 3. Instead of trying to persuade customers to buy what the firm had already produced, marketing-oriented firms found that it was a lot easier to produce only products they had first confirmed, through research, that consumers wanted. 4. Recently there has been an important modification to the marketing concept called the societal marketing concept. The concept suggests that consumers may respond to their immediate needs or wants, while overlooking what is in their own long-run best interest, or the best interest of their family and neighbors, the best interest of their country or region or the entire planet. b) Enlightened marketers take it upon themselves to remind consumers as to what is in the consumer’s long-run best interest; at the same time they set out what their own company is doing in order to be a good corporate citizen. *****Use Key Term societal marketing concept Here; Use Exercise #2 Here***** Embracing the Marketing Concept 1. It is often important for companies to continuously conduct marketing research studies to monitor consumers’ needs and preferences with respect to the products and services that they currently market and what they might develop in the future. 2. They discovered that consumers were highly complex individuals, subject to a variety of psychological and social needs quite apart from their basic functional needs. a) The needs and priorities of different consumer segments differed dramatically. b) The objectives of a company should be to target different products and services to different market segments in order to better satisfy different needs. In order to design new products and marketing strategies that would fulfill consumer needs, they had to study consumers and their consumption behavior in depth. 3. The term consumer research represents the process and tools used to study consumer behavior. *****Use Key Term consumer research Here; Use Exercise #3 Here***** Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning 1. The focus of the marketing concept is to know consumers current needs, and to secure, a picture of their likely future needs. 2. Market and consumer researchers seek to identify the many similarities and differences that exist among the peoples of the world. 3. The marketer must adapt the image of its product so that each market segment perceives the product as better fulfilling its specific needs than competitive products. a) The three elements of this strategic framework are: market segmentation, targeting, and positioning. 4. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into subsets of consumers with common needs or characteristics. 5. Market targeting is the selection of one or more of the segments identified for the  company to pursue. 6. Positioning refers to the development of a distinct image for the product or service in the mind of the consumer, an image that will differentiate the offering from competing ones and faithfully communicate to the target audience that the particular product or service will fulfill their needs better than competing brands. a) Successful positioning centers ar ound two key principles: i)The first principle says that the marketer should communicate the benefits that the product will provide rather than the product’s features. Consumer Behavior free essay sample For example, the success of Creast toothpaste by Procter amp; Gamble, recognized as the best toothpaste by The American Dental Association, was because of it’s consumer learning. Which enables them to add fluoride with the toothpaste. Elements of Consumer Learning Despite their different viewpoints, learning theorists in general agree that in order for learning to occur, certain basic elements must be present. The elements included in most learning theories are motivation, cues, response, and reinforcement. Motivation: The concept of motivation is important to learning theory. Remember, motivation is based on needs and goals. Motivation acts as a spur to learning. The degree of relevance, or involvement, determines the consumer’s level of motivation to search for knowledge or information about a product or service. Uncovering consumer motives is one of the prime tasks of marketers, who then try to teach motivated consumer segments why and how their products will fulfill the consumer’s needs. We will write a custom essay sample on Consumer Behavior or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Cues: If motives serve to stimulate learning, cues are the stimuli that direct these motives. In the marketplace, price, styling, packaging, advertising, and store displays all serve as cues to help consumers fulfill their needs in product-specific ways. Cues serve to direct consumer drives when they are consistent with consumer expectations. Marketers must be careful to provide cues that do not upset those expectations. Response: How individuals react to a drive or cue-how they behave constitutes their response. Learning can occur even when responses are not overt. Reinforcement: Reinforcement increases the likelihood that a specific response will occur in the future as the result of particular cues or stimuli. Theories of consumer learning There are several theories of consumer learning. These are Behavioral Theory of Leaning, Cognitive Theory of Learning, Involvement Theory of Learning , Behavioral Theory of Leaning Behavioral learning theories are sometimes referred to as stimulus-response theories because they are based on the premise that observable responses to external stimuli signal that learning has taken place. Under the behaviorist approach, consumers operate on the environment (e. g. people do things). There are several types of Behavioral learning theories. Such as: * Classical Conditioning * Instrumental Conditioning * Modeling or Observational Learning Classical Conditioning Theory A behavioral learning theory according to which a stimulus is paired with another stimulus that elicits a known response that serves to produce the same response when used alone. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, was the first to describe conditioning and to propose it as a general model of how learning occurs. According to Pavlovian theory, conditioned learning occurs when a stimulus that is paired with another stimulus that elicits a known response serves to produce the same response when used alone. Pavlov demonstrated what he meant by conditioned learning in his studies with dogs which is shown below: Strategic Applications of Classical Conditioning Three basic concepts derive from classical conditioning: Repetition, Stimulus generalization, and Stimulus discrimination. Each of these concepts is important to the strategic applications of consumer behavior. Repetition Increases the association between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus and slows the pace of forgetting. In this advertising wear out is a problem. Stimulus generalization This theory suggests learning does not merely depend on repetition but also on generalization. This helps â€Å"me-too† products to succeed Useful in product extensions. Stimulus discrimination Stimulus discrimination is the opposite of stimulus generalization and results in the selection of a specific stimulus from similar stimuli. This discrimination is the basis of positioning which looks for unique ways to fill needs. Instrumental (Operant) Conditioning A behavioral theory of learning based on a trial-and-error process, with habits forced as the result of positive experiences (reinforcement) resulting from certain responses or behaviors. Like classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning requires a link between a stimulus and a response. This model of learning applies to many situations in which consumers learn about products, services, and retail stores. American psychologist B. F. Skinner is the pioneer in this theory. He distinguished several types of reinforcement in this theory. These are: * Positive Negative * Forgetting * Extinction A Model of Instrumental Conditioning is given below: Observational Learning Observational Learning is a process by which individuals observe how others behave in response to certain stimuli and reinforcements. It is known as modeling or vicarious learning. Consumers often observe how others behave in response to certain situations and the ensuing results tha t occur, and they imitate the positively reinforced behavior when faced with similar situations. An advertisement is shown, where the consumer observes a positive response by two teens. Cognitive Theory of Learning Cognitive Learning Theory holds that the kind of learning most characteristic of human beings is problem solving which enables individuals to gain some control over their environment. Cognitive theories are concerned with how information is processed by the human mind: how it is stored, retained, and retrieved. A simple model of the structure and operation suggests the existence of three separate storage units: the sensory store, the short term store, and the long term store. Information Processing Information Processing relates to cognitive ability and the complexity of the information. Individuals differ in imagery – their ability to form mental images which influences recall. Movement from short-term to long-term storage depends on * Rehearsal * Encoding How consumers store, retain, and retrieve information is shown below: Involvement Theory of Learning Involvement theory proposes that people engage in limited information processing in situations of low importance or relevance to them and in extensive information processing in situations of high relevance. Issues in involvement theory: * Consumer Relevance * Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion * Measure of Involvement Consumer Relevance Involvement depends on degree of personal relevance. High involvement is: Very important to the consumer, Provokes extensive problem solving. Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion Central route to persuasion: For high involvement purchases, Requires cognitive processing. Peripheral route to persuasion: Low involvement, Consumer less motivated to think, Learning through repetition, visual cues, and holistic perception. Measures of Involvement There are several measures of involvement found by different studies. These are: brand involvement, product involveme CONCLUSION Learning certainly occurs intentionally, as when a problem is recognized and information is acquired about products which might solve the problem. Knowledge of learning principles can be useful in understanding how consumers wants and motives are acquired and how their tastes are developed. Also, appreciation of learning can aid marketers of how frequently to repeat advertising messages and develop brand loyalty. Marketing stretegies are based on communicating with the customers-directly,through advertisements, and indirectly,through product appearance,packaging,price,and distribution chennels. So the successful organizations are interested in every aspect of the learning process. However,despite the fact that learning is all-persasive in our lives, ther is no single theory of how people learn. Instead there are two major school of thought concerning learning process-one views learning as a function mental process,that is cognative learning theory and other views it as obsevable behaviors that occurs as the result of exposure to stimuli, that is behavioral learning theory. These theories offers insights to marketers on how to shape their messages to consumers to bring about desired purchase behavior. Besides,this is important that how marketers use learning theories in their marketing strategies, but it also includes ethical issues with consumer learning.