Consumer Behavior

Chapter SUMMARY

Consumers are faced with the needs to make decisions about products and services on a constant basis. Some of the decisions are very important to the consumer and entail great effort, while others are made on virtually an automatic or impulse basis. Perspectives on decision making range from a focus on habits that people develop over time to a focus on novel situations involving a great deal of risk where consumers must carefully collect and analyze information prior to making choices.

A typical decision process involves several steps. The first step is how consumers recognize the problem (problem recognition). Realization that a problem exists may be prompted in a variety of ways, ranging from actual malfunction of a current purchase to a desire for new things based on exposure to different circumstances or advertising that provides a glimpse into what is needed to “live the good life.” Shifts in the actual or ideal state are at the heart of problem recognition.

The second step is information search. This may range from simply scanning memory to determine what has been done to resolve the problem in the past to undertaking extensive fieldwork where the consumer consults a variety of sources to amass as much information as possible from a variety of sources. In many cases, people engage in surprisingly little search. Instead, they rely upon various mental shortcuts, such as brand names or price, or they simply imitate others.

In the third stage the consumer performs an evaluation of alternatives that were developed in the search stage. The product alternatives that are considered comprise the individual’s evoked set. Members of the evoked set usually share some characteristics (i.e., they are categorized similarly). The way products are mentally grouped influences which alternatives will be considered, and some brands are more strongly associated with these categories than are others (i.e., they are more prototypical).

Very often,...