7. Introduction to Consumer Behaviour Relations

Lecture 7Consumer behaviourPage 1

Notes are taken from i)Consumer Behaviour , Blythe J, (1999), Prentice Hall

7. Introduction to Consumer Behaviour Relations.

7.1 Goals.

A goal is an external object to which a motive is directed. Goals differ from drives in that the goal is external, and pulls the person in a given direction; whereas a drive is internal and pushes the individual.

In this way a goal acts as an incentive to take a course of action (or refrain as the case may be). When an individual has a drive which needs to be addressed, there may be a series of goals which would satisfy the drive.

Thus if bored you might seek something to do to relieve the boredom: you might decide you need entertainment. This leads to goal choice: play a computer game, ring a friend, watch a video, channel hop or go shopping in a big department store.

7.2Risk, uncertainty and heuristics

Surprisingly there is a risk associated with buying products. Some examples are:

Type of risk / Explanation / Examples
Physical risk / The fear of injury from the product / Buying a car with defective brakes; buying drugs with unpleasant side effects.
Financial risk / Losing or wasting money / Buying a car that depreciates quickly; buying a computer and finding the price falls to half within three months.
Functional risk / Finding out the product will not do the job you bought it for / Buying a car that breaks down constantly; buying a painkiller that does not stop the pain; buying a computer and having to replace the falty hard drive every two months.
Pschosocial risk / The fear of looking foolish / Buying a suit that friends tnink looks weird on you; buying a Robin Reliant.

To deal with these risks people learn heuristics. These are simple rules that seem to work most of the time. Heuristics are subject to alteration in the light of new knowledge.

Heuristics can be used by the consumer to simplify decision making. They may be stored in the consumers memory, or may be constructed on the spot based on the information received, but either way they allow the consumer to reach rapid decisions without overstretching his or her cognitive capacity.

Use of heuristics in the extreme leads to habitual behaviour. For example I go to the same restaurant on the same night with the same bloke to eat the same meal and have a natter. I cannot be bothered with scanning a huge menu and have to go through all that decision making - I am usually too tired and simply want to enjoy the company.

Some customers may have less rigid heuristics but they may still be a barrier to purchasing. A customer has the price of £1000 as the most he or she will pay for a computer. This may be so strong that a good value for money machine at £1,200 will be spurned in order to buty one which is only half as good for £800.

7.3Life as theatre

People create and project images of themselves to other people; these images are called roles. The role may change according to the circumstances and environment which the individual is in. Role playing behaviour is natural, and not consciously carried out. It is true that people may unconsciously change their accents, movements and statements to fit in with the people around them. Indeed behavour in groups if acceptable often results in the conferment of status.

Erving Goffman developed a useful analogy for the role playing behaviour when he developed his idea, or analogy, of life-as-theatre. This is illustrated by the table below.

Theatrical terms / Explanation / Real-life example
Props / Items used to make gestures, or to support and emphasis movement, or to set a scene. / Cigarettes, walking-sticks, furniture and ornaments.
Costume / Items of clothing which serve to establish a role, or set a scene / Sportswear, business suits, power dressing
Stage / The place where the performance is held, and where the audience is assembled. / Offices, living rooms, pubs, churches.
Backstage / The place where the dressing rooms are; where the actors prepare for their performance, and where they meet their friends and intimates. / Where the individual lives or is relaxed; home; where the persons friends and intimates can visit.
Make-up / The face the actor puts on to emphasise the characterisation. / Cosmetics, perfumes, aftershave, hairdressing.
Script / A pre-planned set of statements intended to communicate the role to the audience. / Jokes, sayings, conversational styles, professional jargon.
Business / The movements actors make in the course of playing the role. / Gestures, body language, facial expressions used to convey emotions and ideas.
Applause / Feedback from the audience; confirmation that the role projection has been effective. / Getting your way in business negotiation, having friends laugh at your jokes, having a conversational response from a friend.

However, Goffman goes to great lengths to emphasise that the role-playing is actually part of the real everyday lives of real people, not the contrived parts played by actors.

7.4Personality

Personality is the collection of individual characteristics that make a person unique, and which control an individual’s responses to and relationship with the external environment. It is a composite of subordinate processes: e.g. attitude, motivation, perception. It is the whole of the person and is the system that governs the behaviour rather than the behaviour itself.

The elements that make up the behaviour are called traits. Considerable effort has gone into identifying traits and relating them to consumer buying behaviour. The totality of the traits (i.e. the personality ) dictates buying behaviour rather than any one trait.

Personality has the following features:

• It is integrated: that is to say, all the factors making up the personality act on each other to produce an integrated whole.
• It is self-serving. The characteristics of personality facilitate the attainment of needs and goals. In other words, the personality exists to meet its own needs.
• Personal characteristics are individualistic and unique, in degree and intensity as well as presence. The number of traits is large and the combinations of traits are huge, thus making each person unique.
• Personality is overt. External behaviour is affected by personality. In other words by observing a persons behaviour, the personality can be deduced, albeit indirectly.
• Personality is consistent. Once a person’s basic personality has been established, it will change only slowly and with some difficulty. Thus we can assume an individuals personality will remain constant throughout the buying process.

Because people are individuals it is difficult for marketers to take a standardised approach. For this reason attempts have been made to identify groupings of personality types which can be approached with a standardised offering.

7.5 Approaches to the study of personality

There are four basic approaches to the study of personality:

1. PschoanalyticThe psychoanalytic approach emphasises psychanalysis. The focus is individual. This approach is typified by Freudianism.

2. TypologyHere individuals are grouped according recognised types.

3. Trait & factor theories. Here the individual traits of the personality are examined as factors making up the whole.

4. PsychographicsThe consumers are measured using their behavioural tendencies in order to infer personality traits.

7.5.1 The psychoanalytic or Freudian approach.

In this approach personality is understood in terms of the id, ego and superego.

According to Freud, the id is the underlying drive of the psyche. It is sometimes called the psychic energy. It is the source of the most basic, elemental, instinctive forces. It largely operates below the conscious level. The ego is the conscious self. It is the part of the mind that makes the day-to-day decisions which lead to satisfaction of the id. The superego is an ‘internalised parent’, the conscience that holds us back from selfish gratification of the id’s needs.

Thus the ego is constantly making compromises between the id’s demands and the superego’srestraints.

The Freudian approach led to motivation research, which tried to explain the underlying reasons for buying. However this became discredited because its claims were too fantastical. However a current spin off from this approach is the focus group. In this a group of ten or so people (called respondents) are interviewed together and asked to discuss their feelings and motivations collectively. The advantage is that the respondents will stimulate each other and there is less risk of the interviewer introducing bias.

Another spin off is the notion of hedonistic consumption. This appeals to the id : it purports to satisfy animal needs. An example is the Club 18-30 holiday company.

7.5.2 Typology.

Followers of Freud had to adapt their thinking and a leader here was Jung. He classified people into two groups (i) introverts (preoccupied with themselves and the internal world) and (ii) extroverts (pre-occupied with others and the outside world). This was an early attempt to classify people into broad types. The process was continued by the mother and daughter team Kathryn Briggs and Isabel Myers. They developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with four personality dimensions:

• Extrovert / introvert, Sensing / intuitive, Thinking / feeling, Judging / perceptive

The combinations of these dimensions creates sixteen different types (2x2x2x2 = 16). An example may be used to illustrate this: ‘What is an ESFJ?’ An ESFJ person is warm hearted, talkative and popular, and likes harmonious relationships. On the other hand an INTJ is likely to be quiet, intelligent, cerebral and reclusive.

7.5.3 Trait & factor theories.

Personality is composed of traits or ‘atoms’ of personality. Traits tend to endure over time. Those that do change tend to change slowly. Those that do change with age are anxiety level (which goes down as the the individual gets older), friendliness (which can go either way) and eagerness for novelty (which tends to go down). Over 18,000 personality traits have been identified. However this stidy has lead to few concrete results.

7.5.4 Psychographics.

Psycographics is sometimes known as life style studies, since it is concerned with people’s values and approaches to life. It attempts to relate quantitatively a consumer’s lifestyle to a consumer’s purchase behaviour. Thus an ecologist is more likely to buy a bike; a vegan is unlikely to buy meat.

This approach combines the strengths of motivation research with those of trait and factor theories.

In the UK the Taylor Nelson category of seven lifestyle types is given blow:

Lifestyle type / Characteristics / % of popn
Sustenance driven groups; motivated by the need for security / Belonger / People who believe in the establishment, traditional family values and patriotism. Averse to change. / 19
Survivor / People who are fighting a ‘holding action’; accepts authority, hard working, quiet traditional. Strong class consciousness / 16
Aimless / Two main categories: the young unemployed whose main motivation is short-term ‘kicks’, and the very old whose motivation is simply day-to-day existence. / 5
Outer-directed group / Conspicuous consumer / Interested in material possessions, taking cues from reference groups (friends, family). Followers of fashion. / 18
Inner directed groups; motivated by self-actualisation / Social resister / Caring group, motivated by ideals of fairness and a good quality of life at the societal level. Altruistic, concerned with social issues like ecology and nuclear disarmament. / 11
Experimentalists / Materialistic and pro-technology, individualistic and interested in novelty. / 14
Self-explorers / Motivated by self-expression and self-realisation. Tolerant, able to think big and look for global, holistic solutions. / 16

7.6Concepts of self

Self-concept is the person’s ideas and feelings about him or herself. It has an important role to play in understanding consumer behaviour, since people buy products which contribute to the self-concept.

‘Of all the personality concepts which have been applied to marketing, self-concept has probably provided the most consistent results and the greatest promise of application to the needs of business firms’ (Gordon Foxall.)

An example: a woman thinks she is a femme fatal - as a consequence she chooses chic clothes to enhance her image. Another example: a student thinks he is a looser - as a consequence he or she rarely washes his tea shirts, wears old scruffy jeans and rarely buys anti-perspirants.

Thus in projecting an image a person can become a super-work of art exploiting all five senses: sight (by dressing well), hearing (by using voice well), smell (by wearing scent), touch (by looking after the skin, by wearing clothes that feel good - cashmere?) and even taste (flavoured lipsticks, mouth washes).The extent to which people will want to make a good impression depends on the following factors:

• the degree of importance attached to impressing the other person
• the degree to which the individual anticipates that the target audience can be impressed
• the cost in time and money in creating the desired image.

Self-concept is a learned construct. Children tend to look for role models to imitate. Children can be crushed by a denial of the role being projected: if people laugh while you are experimenting with the ‘cool dude’ role your favourite uncle adopts it is difficult to recover and try that role again.

The self-concept has four attributes:

1. it is learned, not innate.

1. It is stable and consistent. Self-perception may change, self-concept does not. This accounts for brand loyalty, since self-concept involves a view of which products ‘fit the image’.

1. It is purposeful. There is a reason and a purpose behind it. It is there to enhance a paerson’s ego. It is therefore advisable to not attack a person’s beliefs directly. People get angry or at least defensive when this happens.

1. The self concept is unique to the individual, and promotes individualism.

7.7 Attitudes

Attitude can be defined as ‘a learned tendency to respond to an object in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way’. Whwether a product will be bought or not depends to a large extent on a on the consumer’s attitude towards it. Marketing effort may have to go into breaking down customers attitudes to product offerings. An example: an anti-racist policy is introduced in a country yet there is an attitude against it. The attitude must be changed, slowly and carefully, until people wonder what the problem was.

An attitude is

• learned, not instinctive
• not behaviour; rather it is a predisposition towards a particuler behaviour
• implies a relationship between a person and an object
• fairly stable
• either positive or negative - you are either for something (direction) with a certain amount of feeling (intensity).
• Attitudes are not observable - they are predispositions. They are formed through the result of ecxperience. For example: I have an attitude problem about the refectory at Uxbridge. I find it too loud and moronic. The music is a pain. However, I make myself go there to get a drink or a sandwich. I compare it unfavourably to the relative peace of the refectory at Osterley. But I realise some students must think it is marvellous.

7.8Culture

Culture is a set of beliefs and values that are shared by most people within a group. The groupings are usually relatively large. Culture is passed from one group member to another group member, and is usually passed down from one generation to another. Culture is learned, subjective and arbitrary. Culture can be understood by looking at food and language.

For example in France cheese is regarded as a delicacy whereas in Japan it is regarded as rotted milk. Also the French regard snails as a delicacy whereas in Britain it would be regarded as an offensive meal to offer a guest.

Even when languages are shared there will be differences across a culture. Thus when an American, speaking in English, talks about wearing pants he is actually taking about trousers. This creates huge problems for an Englishman shopping for pants in New York.

Most cultures are ethnocentric. They believe their culture is the best culture.

Hofstede [Culture’s consequences: International differences in Work-Related Values (sage, 1984)] carried out a a transnational survey in 66 countries with over 6,000 respondents. He found there were four dimensions to the national characteristics.

1. Individualism versus collectivism. In the USA there is strong individualism. The frontier mentality has taken a hold. Freedom of speech for the individual is enshrined in the first ammendment. In Holland there are strong individualistic tendencies - it is a land that tolerates a wide range of sexual orientations. It is on the increase in the UK particularly with the Generation X (born between mid 1960s to early 1980s). In Japan and Taiwan there is a strong collectivist culture in which service is appreciated..

1. Uncertainty avoidance. This is the extent to which a culture will keep rigidly to the rules and customs in order to reduce uncertainty. A high level of uncertainty avoidance is a culture where tradition prevails and new ideas are not welcome.

1. Power distance. This refers to the extent to which the culture favours the centralisation of power.

1. Masculinity-femininity. This is the extent to which the culture exhibits traditional male characteristics of asseriveness, achievement and wealth acquisition over the traditional feminine attributes of nurturing, concern for the environmentt and concern for the poor. By this definition America is an example a ‘masculine’ culture.

7.9Family life cycle and gender roles

The family is a most powerful influence for decision making and purchasing. Reasons are:

For children the parental influence is the earliest and so colours their perception of all that follows. Indeed, the super ego can be thought of as an internalised parent.

Parents desire to do the best they can for their children influences the decisions they make about family purchases. Thus the purchase disposable nappies is an example of 'comfort for the child'.

Siblings influence each other by the examples they set: the older sibling cares for and looks after the younger sibling. There are also wider family influences - particularly in extended families.

From a marketing viewpoint, the level of demand for many products is dictated more by the number of households than by the number of families. The relevance of families to marketing is therefore much more about consumer behaviour than about consumer demand levels.