Short Summary: What´s Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior

What is consumer behavior?

Consumer behaviour is the study of how individual customers, groups or organizations select, buy, use, and dispose ideas, goods, and services to satisfy their needs and wants. It refers to the actions of the consumers in the marketplace and the underlying motives for those actions. Consumer behaviour is a topic of great interest for marketers because a command of this field can be crucial in terms of choosing the right marketing strategy, and so make busi-ness prosperous (Solomon et al. 1999 p. 10).

The term consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, evaluating, and dispensing of products and services that they except will satisfy their needs.

Gone are the days when manufacturers could have sold anything to the consumers. Henry Ford once famously said, "My customers can have a car of any color as long as it is black". It Henry Ford had been born in today's world he would have definitely thought a several times before giving this statement. Now a days it is consumer whose buying preferences decide what should be manufactured, in what quantity and what should be the quality of the product. Thus ,a marketer has to take into account various factors while deciding on marketing a product as consumers have different preferences and sometimes totally diverse preferences. So the task of manufacture and marketer becomes onerous and therefore it is very important to understand the consumer behavior.

Nature of Consumer Behavior:

1. Influenced by various factors:

a. Marketing factors such as product design, price, promotion, packaging, positioning and dis¬tribution.

b. Personal factors such as age, gender, education and income level.

c. Psychological factors such as buying motives, perception of the product and attitudes towards the product.

d. Situational factors such as physical surroundings at the time of purchase, social surroundings and time

Gone are the days when manufacturers could have sold anything to the consumers. Henry Ford once famously said, "My customers can have a car of any color as long as it is black". It Henry Ford had been born in today's world he would have definitely thought a several times before giving this statement. Now a days it is consumer whose buying preferences decide what should be manufactured, in what quantity and what should be the quality of the product. Thus ,a marketer has to take into account various factors while deciding on marketing a product as consumers have different preferences and sometimes totally diverse preferences. So the task of manufacture and marketer becomes onerous and therefore it is very important to understand the consumer