Text 12. Consumer behaviour from the advertising perspective

Because their job is to match people and products, advertisers are keenly interested in consumer buying behaviour. The objectives of con­sumer advertising are to motivate, modify, or reinforce consumer atti­tudes, perceptions, beliefs, and behaviour. This requires the effective blend­ing of the behavioral sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) with the communicating arts (writing, drama, graphics, photography). The behavioral characteristics of large groups of people give directional force to advertising aimed at those groups. Thus, advertising uses trends in mass-consumer behaviour to create fashion or habit in specific consumer behaviour.

Social scientists have developed many sophisticated theories of con­sumer behaviour. They have given the marketing community a wealth of data and a variety of theoretical models to explain the sequence of behav­iours involved in making a purchase decision. For our purposes, we shall look at this information from the viewpoint of the advertiser.

The primary mission of advertising is to reach prospective custom­ers to influence their awareness, attitudes, and buying behaviour. To do this, an advertiser must make the marketing communication process work at its highest level of efficiency.

The moment a medium delivers an ad message to the consumer, his mental computer runs a rapid evaluation program called the consumer decision-making process. This involves a series of subprocesses that are affected by a variety of influences.

First, three personal processes govern the way the consumer discerns raw data (stimuli) and translates them into feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. These include the perception, the learning, and the motivation processes. These processes determine how consumers see the world around them, how they learn information and habits, and how they actualize their personal needs and motives.

Second, an advertiser needs to understand how the consumer's men­tal processes and behaviour are affected by two sets of influences. Inter­personal influences on consumer behaviour include the consumer's fam­ily, society, and culture. Impersonal influences—factors often outside the consumer's control— include such things as time, place, and environ­ment. All of these further affect the personal processes (perception, learn­ing, motivation) mentioned above.

After dealing with all these processes and influences, the consumer faces the pivotal decision, to buy or not to buy? But taking that final step typically requires yet another process, the evaluation of selection alterna­tives—where brands, sizes, styles, and colours are chosen. And even if the purchase is made, the consumer's postpurchase evaluation will have a dramatic impact on all his subsequent purchases.

Like the marketing communication process, the decision-making process is circular in nature. The advertiser who understands this process can develop messages that are more capable of reaching and being under­stood by consumers.

EXERCISES

Exercise 1.