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The link between people’s personalities and their buying behaviour is somewhat unclear, but market researchers continue to study it. For example, some studies have shown that “sensation seekers,” or people who exhibit extremely high levels of openness, are mor...

The “evaluation of alternatives stage” in the Individual Decision Making Process is worthy of a book on its own! There are many different techniques marketers will employ to get the attention of consumers and be top-of-mind when they are ready to make a purcha...

Continue Learning A powerful tool for marketers is forming and leveraging brand community. A dedicated, loyal, and passionate consumer base will rally behind their favourite brand and spread their joy and enthusiasm far and wide. (That pays more than any Su...

In additional to demographic and social influences, we also examine some of the situational factors that influence consumer decision making, such as the design and presentation of a retail environment. While many retailers seek to maximize sales and grow their...

The typical outcome of social influence is that our beliefs and behaviours become more similar to those of others around us. At times, this change occurs in a spontaneous and automatic sense, without any obvious intent of one person to change the other. Perhap...

While the decision-making process appears quite standardized, no two people make a decision in exactly the same way. As individuals, we have inherited and learned a great many behavioral tendencies: some controllable, some beyond our control. Further, the ways...

Continue Learning Consumer decision making isn’t nearly as straight forward as, “need/want > buy”. Making choices in a world of abundance can be an intense and often discouraging process. Watch this short Ted Talk by Dr. Sheena Iyengar about how to make cho...

The last stage in the Consumer Decision Making Process is disposal. What options do consumers have at the end of a product’s lifecycle? What about when we tire, get bored, or outgrow something we own? Sustainable marketing requires a deliberate attempt to mini...

One of the newer and increasingly important set of factors that is being used to understand consumer behaviour is lifestyle. Lifestyle has been generally defined as the attitudes (or attitudes), interests, and opinions (AIOs) of the potential customer. It is w...

An organization that wants to be successful must consider buyer behavior when developing the marketing mix. Buyer behavior is the actions people take with regard to buying and using products. Marketers must understand buyer behavior, such as how raising or low...

Continue Learning The Elaboration Likelihood Model (“ELM”) also presented as the “Central and Peripheral Route to Persuasion” demonstrates the different ways in which consumers process a message relative to their involvement: high involvement (central); low...

Every day we are bombarded by advertisements of every sort. The goal of these ads is to sell us cars, computers, video games, clothes, and even political candidates. The ads appear on billboards, website popup ads, buses, TV infomercials, and…well, you name it...

Although we might use the term in a different way in our everyday life (e.g., “Hey, he’s really got an attitude!”), social psychologists reserve the term attitude to refer to our relatively enduring evaluation of something, where the something is called the at...

Continue Learning Find an example of a brand actively targeting the “PANKs” market segment. What features exist in this brand’s marketing (e.g. commercials, ads, imagery, messaging) indicate that this target market consists of professional women without chi...

A brand consists of any name, term, design, style, words, symbols or any other feature that distinguishes the goods and services of one seller from another. A brand also distinguishes one product from another in the eyes of the customer. All of its elements (i...

In the previous sections we explored some of the different external factors that influence consumer decision making, such as demographic, social, and situational. In this section we take a closer look at another external factor, culture: what it is; how it is ...