External Influences on Consumer Decision Making Process
At the time of purchasing a product or service, all of us are confronted with several external influences that involve our own culture, subculture, household structure, and groups.
1. Cultural Factors
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Cultural factors exert the broadest and deepest influence on consumer behavior. The marketer needs to understand the role played by the buyer’s culture, subculture, and social class.
• Culture:
Culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behavior. Human behavior is largely learned. Growing up in a society, a child learns basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviors from the family and other important institutions. Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts in order to imagine new products that might be wanted. For example, the cultural shift towards greater concern about health and fitness has created a huge industry for exercise equipment and clothing, lower-calorie and more natural foods, and health and fitness services.
• Subculture:
Each culture contains smaller subcultures or groups of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions. Many subcultures make up important market segments and marketers often design products and marketing programs tailored to their needs
• Social Class:
Almost every society has some form of social class structure. Social classes are society’s relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviors. Some class systems have a greater influence on buying behavior than others. In most western countries ‘lower’ classes may exhibit upward mobility, showing buying behavior similar to that of the ‘upper’ classes. But in other cultures, where a caste system gives people a distinctive role, buying behavior is more firmly linked to social class. Upper classes in almost all societies are often more similar to each other than they are to the rest of their own society. When selecting products and services, including food, clothing, household items, and personal care products, they make choices that are less culture-bound than those of the lower classes. Generally, the lower social classes are more culture-bound, although young people of all classes are less so.
2. Social Factors
A consumer’s behavior is also influenced by social factors, such as the consumer’s small groups, family, and social roles and status. Because these social factors can strongly affect consumer responses, companies must take them into account when designing their marketing strategies.
· Groups:
Groups influence a person’s behavior. Groups that have a direct influence and to which a person belongs are called membership groups. Some are primary groups with whom there is regular but informal interaction – such as family, friends, neighbors and fellow workers. Some are secondary groups, which are more formal and have less regular interaction. These include organizations like religious groups, professional associations and trade unions.
· Family:
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Family members can strongly influence buyer behavior. We can distinguish between two families in the buyer’s life. The buyer’s parents make up the family of orientation. Parents provide a person with an orientation towards religion, politicsand economics, and a sense of personal ambition, self-worth, and love. Even ifthe buyer no longer interacts very much with his or her parents, the latter canstill significantly influence the buyer’s behavior. In countries where parentscontinue to live with their children, their influence can be crucial.
· Roles arid Status:
A person belongs to many groups – family, clubs, organizations. The person’s position in each group can be defined in terms of both role and status. Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society. People often choose products that show their status in society.
3. Personal Factors
A buyer’s decisions are also influenced by personal characteristics such as the buyer’s age and life-cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle.
• Age and Life-Cycle Stage:
People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetimes. Tastes in food, clothes, furniture, and recreation are often age-related. Buying is also shaped by the family life cycle – the stages through which families might pass as they mature over time.
• Occupation:
A person’s occupation affects the goods and services bought. Blue-collar workers tend to buy more work clothes, whereas white-collar workers buy more suits and ties
• Economic Circumstances:
A person’s economic situation will affect product choice. Marketers of income-sensitive goods closely watch trends in personal income, savings, and interest rates. If economic indicators point to a recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition and reprice their products.
• Lifestyle:
People coming from the same subculture, social class and occupation may have quite different lifestyles. Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interests and opinions. Lifestyle captures something more than the person’s social class or personality. It profiles a person’s whole pattern of acting and interacting in the world. The lifestyle concept, when used carefully, can help the marketer understand changing consumer values and how they affect buying behavior.
Internal Influences on Consumer Decision Making Process
Internal influences basically come from consumers own lifestyle and way of thinking. These are consumers’ personal thoughts, self-concepts, feelings, attitudes, lifestyles, motivation, and memory. These internal influences can also be known as psychological influences. Internal influences depict the ways through which consumers interact with the universe around them, identify their feelings, collect and examine information, develop ideas and beliefs, and take some specific action.
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· Personality and Self-Concept:
Each person’s distinct personality influences his or her buying behavior. Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and lasting responses to one’s own environment. Personality is usually described in terms of traits such as self-confidence, dominance, sociability, autonomy, defensiveness, adaptability and aggressiveness. Personality can be useful in analyzing consumer behavior for certain product or brand choices. For example, coffee makers have discovered that heavy coffee drinkers tend to be high on sociability. Thus Nescafe ads show people coming together over a cup of coffee.
· Psychological Factors:
A person’s buying choices are further influenced by four important psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.
1. Motivation
A person has many needs at any given time. Some are biological, arising from states of tension such as hunger, thirst or discomfort. Others are psychological, arising from the need for recognition, esteem or belonging. Most of these needs will not be strong enough to motivate the person to act at a given point in time. A need becomes a. motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity. A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
MASLOW’S THEORY OF MOTIVATION
Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by particular needs at particular times. Why does one person spend much time and energy on personal safety and another on gaining the esteem of others? Maslow’s answer is that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy, from the most pressing to the least pressing. In order of importance, they are (1) physiological needs, (2) safety needs, (3) social needs, (4) esteem needs and (5) self-actualization needs. A person tries to satisfy the most important need first. When that important need is satisfied, it will stop being a motivator and the person will then try to satisfy the next most important need. For example, a starving man (need 1) will not take an interest in the latest happenings in the art world (need 5), or in how he is seen or esteemed by others (need 3 or 4), or even in whether he is breathing clean air (need 2). But as each important need is satisfied, the next most important need will come into play.
2. Perception
A motivated person is ready to act. How the person acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. Two people with the same motivation and in the same situation may act quite differently because they perceive the situation differently. People can form different perceptions of the same stimulus because of three perceptual processes: selective attention, selective distortion and selective retention.
3. Learning
When people act, they learn. Learning describes changes in an individual’s behavior arising from experience. Learning theorists say that most human behavior is learned. Learning occurs through the interplay of drive, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement.
4. Beliefs and Attitudes
Through doing and learning, people acquire their beliefs and attitudes. These, in turn, influence their buying behavior. A belief is a descriptive thought that a person lies about something. Marketers are interested in the beliefs that people formulate about specific products and services because these beliefs make up product and brand images that affect buying behavior. If some of the beliefs are wrong and prevent the purchase, the marketer will want to launch a campaign to correct them.
People have attitudes regarding religion, politics, clothes, music, food and almost everything else. An attitude describes a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies towards an object or idea. Attitudes put people into a frame of mind of liking or disliking things, of moving towards or away from them.
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