Five Stages Of Consumer Decision Process

Most of consumers make decision regarding every aspect of our daily life. One of the decisions that can make is whether to purchase or not to purchase a product or a service. This process is known as the buyer decision process. The idea of a person cautiously examining the characteristics of products, brands or services and reasonably choosing the cheapest one that solves a clearly known need portrays the phrase ‘consumer decision’ (Hawkins & Mothersbaugh, 2012). The buyer decision process model consists of five stages, namely need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, product purchase, and post-purchase evaluation (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1). The first stage of buyer decision process is need recognition. This is

When consumers are completed with their searching stage, they make an evaluation to decide whether which product should be purchased. Evaluation is the process where consumer has the ability to define different choices and select the option that will satisfy him (Jeddi, Atefi, Jalali, Poureisa, & Haghi, 2013). The alternatives that are defined during evaluation stage are considered before purchasing a particular products or services. These alternatives also known as considerable set or evoked set. After constructing the considerable set, consumers evaluate alternatives by depending on pre-existing evaluations or forming new alternatives. Pre-existing evaluations mean consumers have own experiences on the usage of the products. Consumers evaluate alternatives based on experiences gained from certain products and decide whether to repurchase or not next time. According to Thangasamy and Patikar (2014), previous experiences act as most influencing factor when consumers make brand alternatives for the purchase of durable goods. This result is based on the case study conducted by E. Thangasamy and Dr. Gautam Patikar in the year 2004 in order to analyse consumer buying behaviour of durable goods in Nagaland. Besides, pre-existing evaluations can also be indirect experiences. For example, a consumer buys a product based on review given by their friends who have purchased the product earlier. While for constructing new evaluations, it means that consumers insert new alternatives that have never been tried or used before into the considerable set before proceeding to the purchase stage. So, at the end of evaluation stage, consumers figure out and form the brand preference in order to proceed to purchase decision