Chapter 19 of PSYCHOMarketing by Roger Nichols
Consumer behavior can be defined simply as how people make decisions about purchasing products, what they need, and what they want. Once a brand understands their consumer’s behavior, they will be able to tailor their services to align with them. When consumers purchase products, it often seems like it is their sole decision and they buy to meet a need. However, this is not entirely true, as research has shown there are several reasons consumers purchase products, and there are several factors that influence consumer behavior. Consumer buying behavior can be defined as the selecting, buying, and consuming of goods and services to satisfy the wants and needs of humans—which means there are also some psychological processes involved in consumer behavior.
Many factors, specificities, and characteristics influence the individual in making purchasing decisions; the decision to purchase is itself a consequence of several elements. At first, the consumer tries to search for the commodities he would like to consume; then he selects the goods or services that appear to offer the most satisfaction. After choosing his goods/services, he begins to make a mental estimate of his budget. The last phase occurs when the consumer takes into consideration the prices of products, through analysis, and finally makes the decision about the commodities he should consume. In the process, these factors influencing the purchases of the consumer can be influenced by personal, social, cultural, economic, and psychological factors.
As we all know, psychology refers to anything that involves the thought process. Humans don’t just make decisions without weighing options, and purchasing products consists of a number of different thought processes as well. We all have different needs, several products abound, and there are brands out there that are ready to help us fulfill our needs, while they also generate revenue at the same time.
Consumer psychology deals with how information is processed to make the ultimate purchase decisions. The psychological factors are subtle, and because they are not apparent, they are likely to be ignored. According to Boddy and Croft (2016), “We all have a personality, but we do not know how it is systematically related to our behavior as consumers.” Lin (2010) went further, by stating that consumers are likely to use a brand in line with their personality traits. These psychological factors are quite essential when we want to make purchase decisions, because they are not limited just to a group of people; these factors are peculiar to us all. Moreover, they depend on other individual factors to manifest. Their influence is quite overwhelming but too complex to study. These groups of factors embody the ways consumers respond to purchase decisions. In their minds, the external influences act as a form of trigger that can largely affect the process of motivation.
Needs
We all have needs as humans, and they range from simple to complex. Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, put forward a theory in 1943, in an essay called, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” He proposed a five-stage pyramid model that explains humans’ needs.
According to Maslow, the urgent needs are at the lower part of the pyramid, while the less urgent ones are at the top of the pyramid. While the pyramid will be explained extensively in Chapter 21, we’ll just take a look at what we need to know here.
At the bottom of the pyramid are biological and physiological needs like food, sleep, and water; they are the lowest level in the hierarchy of human needs. Maslow speculated that these three needs are basic and must be met before much more complex ones. Imagine someone going shopping when she is hungry or fatigued; she will be more concerned with fulfilling the need for sleep or food even if the shopping is essential. In addition, the need for these fundamental things is recurring, so the truth is that human needs are insatiable and change with time, exposure, and orientation, as other needs arise at different points in our lives. If you can remember correctly, your childhood needs were not the same as your needs as an adult. Children crave love and affection, and they want to feel they belong. The security needs of a child may include growing up with parents and, perhaps, one or more siblings. The security needs of an adult will encompass health insurance, a good job, a decent place to live, and some savings.
The second rung on the pyramid is safety and security needs, like the need for shelter and clothing; these, too, tend to be enduring. The next rung after these is social interaction, the need to establish relationships with others who share one’s values. This is the all-important need to belong to a group or have a sense of belonging, or identity. For example, high school kids crave social needs. They usually don’t want to be the different one among their peers; they want to belong to a circle of friends and go on dates. This phase often occurs in the life of teenagers, who will go to any length to ensure they are perceived as relevant and socially accepted— they will all get certain electronic devices and certain types of clothing in order to be more conscious of themselves. The fourth need on the pyramid is self-esteem. This is the need to appear confident and be treated with respect. It is the need to feel important and self-sufficient. For example, someone who has a good job and degree might consider how people would view him if he did not marry before he was 40. Even though we’ve evolved into a realization that marriage is not an achievement, nor compulsory, some people still feel their lives are incomplete if they are not married. Some get married to stroke their self-esteem and prove to others that they are successful in every facet of their lives. The fifth need is self-actualization: it is the last and highest stage on the hierarchy of needs, the one that has to do with reaching one’s potential and achieving the purpose one believes he or she is meant to fulfill. Self-actualization is the apex of every human’s needs, because it is influenced by the drive to be the best one can be in their field, family, society, etc. It is the path to self-fulfillment, which is the ultimate satisfaction of every human.
After the economic crisis the world experienced in 2008, a lot of companies were affected, especially some companies who were watching Hyundai. The company was smart enough to factor in people’s need for safety and security by putting out an advertising campaign that assured potential buyers that, if they purchased their cars and later could not afford them, they could return them. This made their consumers feel secure. It also boosted the company’s income. Other automobile companies began offering similar services. Banks were also smart enough to offer their clients “worry-free” mortgages, to make potential homebuyers feel secure. First Mortgage Corp., a Texas-based bank, offered their clients the option of paying for their mortgages for six months if they lost their job. All they had to do was pay a fee of $500.
It is also noteworthy that needs are different among individuals and cultures. Researchers have established that, while attaining self-actualization may be important to people in the United States, consumers in Eastern cultures are more inclined to lean toward a focus on belonging to a group or satisfying their group needs.
Marketers look at cultural differences in addition to individual needs. Experts have come to the conclusion that groups are quite important, as they can affect the outcome of advertising. This means that groups versus individuals is another avenue that can affect product decisions.
Perception
Perception is simply the procedure by which people select, arrange, and interpret information they receive so they can come to a reasonable decision. The perception of a situation at a given time may determine if and how a person will act; it is the way he makes sense of his situation. This is controlled via stimuli that heighten or alert the human senses.
As you well know, you and I have five senses: sight, which deals with visuals; hearing, which deals with auditory; touch, which is all about tactile; olfactory, which is responsible for smell; and taste, which is sometimes known as gustatory. The combination of these senses is important to humans because they help us navigate the physical world we live in; they form our perceptions about people and things. Ries (2009) carried out an experiment in which some selected participants were blindfolded and asked to taste a new brand of clear beer. The majority of them said the beer tasted like regular beer. When the experiment was carried out again, this time without blindfolds, the result was that most of them described the beer as having a watery taste. From the experiments, it is obvious that what we see can affect the way we perceive taste, and that even though the five senses can perform individually, they also work together.
Every day, consumers all across the globe are exposed to so many advertisements they see on billboards and social media, hear on radio, and see and hear on television—thanks to technology. In 1999, Kalle Lasn, a magazine editor, reported the average U.S. consumer could see close to 3,000 advertisements in a single day.
Broadly, there are three processes to perception. They are “selective attention,” “selective distortion,” and “selective retention.” In cases of selective attention, marketers and sellers make attempts to get customers’ attention. However, in cases of selective distortion, customers try to read between the lines of the information presented to them in ways that will cement the perception they have already formed. This is linked to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (Chapter 13), in which a piece of information you accessed once begins to manifest by showing up everywhere. The truth is, most of us are more inclined to notice advertisements that are about the products and services we crave or use. Selective attention is the process of “sieving”—like a prospector looking for gold—information centered on relevance and timeliness. This process is often described as a suit of armor that helps to filter information and remove what is deemed unnecessary. At another time, people forget information, despite its relevance to them. This process is known as selective retention, which happens when information goes against the beliefs and cultural identity of a person. In this case, the consumer’s belief will be stronger than any willingness to change, despite the campaigns. In a bid to ensure that ads get through to consumers and are memorable, companies often use repetition. Apple is an example, with its repeated advertisements for the iPhone and other products.
One of the problems advertisers face is selective distortion, which leads to their intended messages being misconstrued. A lot of commercials for a flat tummy are often misconstrued in this way, because most consumers just believe the products will help them achieve a toned ab, without considering nutrition and the waistline they saw on the model as well. Also, the method by which information flows makes it vulnerable to distortions. When a story goes from one person to another, it will be added to and removed from, depending upon the person hearing it. This is why, in most cases, when the person who initially dispatched the information heard the account that is being spread, he or she will likely notice an entirely different version of what they said at the outset. This can happen with advertisements and other kinds of information, too.
Motivation
Motivation is simply the inner drive that pushes consumers to develop purchasing behaviors. When there is a need, it is not enough to push the consumer to purchase something to satisfy the need; other factors are needed to motivate him or her. That is psychological, so it usually works at the subconscious level, and is very difficult to measure. As noted, above, we humans always have needs, and they can be physiological, biological, social, or emotional. The nature of our needs is naturally set up in a way that sorts the pressing ones before the least pressing. It is like walking into a restaurant to eat chicken risotto and having an overwhelming urge to pee at the same time. Even though you might be hungry at that point, you will most likely not enjoy your meal while your bladder is full and begging you to get relief. This is why some researchers opine that a need becomes a drive for an action when it can lead to satisfaction, which is the ultimate goal of indulging a need. Motivation is directly related to the need and is expressed in the same type of classification as defined in the stages of the consumer buying-decision process. It is vital that brands create, make apparent, or reinforce a need for their products in consumers’ minds so they can develop a motivation to purchase the products.
Personality
Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to consistent and lasting responses from the consumer’s environment. Human personality is tremendously varied and, marketly speaking, it depends on several factors. Brand personality refers to a certain mixture of traits that might be attributed to particular brands; brands always create images that are specific to the services they offer. Some examples of brand personalities are values like sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
Interpretation
An advertisement by a brand is an attempt to communicate many things, like brand values, personality, purpose, and others. The interpretation of brand ads and identities depends on the personality of the interpreter, and how a person interprets a brand statement is important, because it helps guide subsequent advertising campaigns. Another factor that is important in understanding consumer behavior is emotions.
Emotions
In advertising, the emotions of the customer are also important; simply put, advertisements are targeted at emotions. There has been a great deal of research to explain the importance of emotions, which can be both positive and negative. For example, feelings like fear and sadness are negative emotions, while happiness and excitement are positive emotions. Diverse behavioral consequences can spring from different emotions: the type of emotion evoked by an advertisement often determines the response of the consumer. A disconnect in advertising strategy can either lead to feelings of sorrow or anger in the consumer, which can, in turn, cause the person to boycott a product, or just be angry. Like frames, the emotion a brand projects can either repel or attract a customer’s choice. Also, certain negative emotions, like anxiety, anger, and angst, evoke high physiological arousal, which can lead to an increased heart rate. Other emotions that are negative, like depression and sadness, might involve a state of low arousal and a decreased drive for any buying activity at all.
Persuasion can be increased, and matching activity level to a particular emotional state can influence consumer choice as well. An example of this is a car advertisement that follows a drama show and is designed to connect emotionally with the prospective customer.
Despite these subtle advertising methods, many people still believe the choices they make are derived from their own rational analysis of the alternatives they have. As we’ve seen, however, emotions greatly influence purchase decisions. They are the main reason why some brands are popular and seem to have monopolized the market. After all, many of these same products are available through other less popular but available brands, often even at cheaper prices. People pay for brand names because of the emotions that have been inspired in them. Many brands project their personalities in their advertisements, and people connect with these personalities, just as they connect with human personalities.
Moreover, the narrative that accompanies a brand’s advertising can influence its impact on consumers. The story that follows an ad, the person involved in the story, and how the person tells the story are all essential. Ads that reinforce dominant narratives have been popular; an example is the image of a Black maid in the United States of America. These emotions are to ensure that customers buy for a reason, and these marketers are eager to provide the reason to buy the product. When Apple releases annual upgrades to the iPhone, many people buy it to reinforce their identity as an image. It is not necessarily because of new functions, but, rather, it is that the advertisement has convinced them by showing the image of a user who everyone wants to be.