Consumer behavior from the point of view of marketing represents a set of activities that people perform from the moment a need arises, until it is satisfied.
The activities that people execute may be influenced by internal and external variables.
Internal and external aspects of consumption
The internal aspects of consumption are all aspects that come from within the individual. While external aspects come from the external environment that surrounds the person. All these aspects will affect consumer behavior, when seeking to meet their needs with the goods and services available in the market.
Consumer Behavior Process
How does the consumer behavior process develop? We can summarize it in the following phases:
- Lacks:The process begins when there is a lack, such as when something is needed, for example, when someone feels hungry, but it is not an intense hunger.
- The needs: They are the deficiencies that manifest themselves consciously in the consumer, that is, when he becomes aware that he needs to eat something. The needs may vary according to age, fitness, weather and many other conditions that make them different.
- The motivations:They are considered as the impulses that make the person act with concrete actions, trying to find a satisfactory to meet the need. How to ask a friend for food or go to a restaurant to eat.
- The wishes: In this step the wishes appear or the different ways as everyone wants to cover their need, some want to eat a cake, another a taco, another a pizza and so we can mention a lot of satisfiers.
- Learning:The way the person learns to solve their need is conditioned by their family, social environment and culture.
If your family is healthy, you will prefer a salad to a hamburger. If you are with friends you will prefer a pizza to a formal food menu. If the person is Spanish, he will prefer a paella to Mexican tacos.
- Attitude:It is the consumer’s response to accept a satisfactory or reject it; if the person is offered to eat dog meat, according to his cultural customs he approves or totally disgusts him.
- Economic situation: The choice of goods and services is also determined by the economic situation of the person, you may want to eat at a five-star hotel, but if you do not have enough money you end up eating in a cheap fast food restaurant.
- Commercial equipment: The commercial infrastructure where we want to cover the need also decisively affects the choice of the satisfactory, if someone is in a shopping center and wants to eat pizza. If there are no pizzerias in that place you cannot opt for that product.
- Advertising:Advertising is another variable that influences the search for a satisfactory one, because this means of communication seeks to persuade consumers to make certain purchase choices, promoting different satisfiers with which the need expressed in the person can be met.
Steps in consumer behavior
The graph simplifies the steps that the consumer follows in the process of emerging a need, until it is satisfied.
We can conclude by affirming that for marketing to know precisely and clearly the way the consumer behaves is something very important, because each consumer is different and companies must seek to satisfy them all by giving them an adequate solution.
Also with this we reinforce the idea that marketing does not create needs in the consumer, because this occurs as an internal lack; The role of marketing is to generate the best satisfiers to meet those needs.
