MSMK7001 Chap.5 Influences on Consumer Behavior
Influences on Consumer Behavior
Opening the black box
Consumer buyer behavior is how final consumers buy for personal use. The course models it as stimuli, the four Ps and wider forces, entering a black box made of the buyer's characteristics and decision process, and producing observable responses such as brand, dealer, timing and amount.
This chapter works through the characteristics, grouped as cultural, social, personal and psychological.
Culture reaches into the shopping basket
Culture is the set of values, perceptions and behaviors learned from family and institutions.
The lecture uses self-construal to show its reach: independent and interdependent selves differ in shape preferences, impulsive consumption and whether they pursue gains or avoid losses.
Subcultures and social class add finer divisions, and the rice theory offers a memorable account of north-south differences within China, traced to the cooperative labor that rice farming demanded.
Other people and the person
Membership and reference groups, word of mouth, influencers and online communities shape attitudes.
A low-budget horror film's buzz campaign and a study of medal winners' expressions show how powerful comparison can be, and the course warns about echo chambers in online networks. Family roles matter too.
Personal factors take in a buyer's age, job, finances and lifestyle as well as personality and self-image, with need for uniqueness and a five-dimension brand personality framework as the lecture's tools.
How the mind bends a choice
Psychological factors are motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes. The needs hierarchy orders motives from physiological to self-actualization.
Perception is selective in attention, distortion and retention, and the lecture adds three choice effects that any pricing or range decision can use: the drift toward middle options, the effect of a dominated extra option, and the power of defaults.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The stimulus, black box and response model
- 02
Culture and self-construal
- 03
Subculture, the rice theory and social class
- 04
Reference groups, buzz and social comparison
- 05
Personal factors and brand personality
- 06
Motivation and the hierarchy of needs
- 07
Selective perception and three choice effects
- 08
Learning, beliefs and attitudes
Worked example · free
Explain a purchase with the right family of influence
- 2Identify the social influence at work.
- 2Identify the personal influence at work.
- 2State a marketing implication for each.
Key terms
- Consumer Buyer Behavior
- How end consumers buy: the purchasing of individuals and households acquiring goods and services for their own use.
- Culture
- The core values, ways of seeing, wants and habits a person absorbs from family and the other institutions of a society.
- Subculture
- A group inside a wider culture whose members hold shared values that grow out of shared experiences and circumstances.
- Reference Group
- A group a person measures themselves against, which therefore shapes their attitudes and behavior.
- Motivation Research
- Qualitative research aimed at uncovering the motives consumers hold without being aware of them.
- Selective Distortion
- The tendency to interpret information in a way that supports what a person already believes.
- Compromise Effect
- The tendency of buyers to avoid the extremes of a range and choose a middle option, noted in the lecture as especially strong in Eastern cultures.
- Brand Personality
- The set of human traits attributed to a brand, grouped in the lecture's framework as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.
Influences on Consumer Behavior FAQ
What are the four groups of factors that influence consumer behavior?
Cultural factors, meaning culture, subculture and social class; social factors, meaning groups, networks, family and roles; personal factors, meaning a buyer's age and stage in life, job, finances, lifestyle, personality and self-image; and psychological factors, meaning motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.
What is the rice theory?
It is an account of cultural differences between northern and southern China. Rice, historically grown in the south, needs about twice the labor hours of wheat and shared irrigation, so farmers had to cooperate. The theory holds that southerners became more interdependent than northerners, and the lecture reports café behavior consistent with it.
How do defaults change what people choose?
People tend to accept the default when a decision feels difficult. The lecture shows this with organ donation: where people must tick a box to join, effective consent is low, and where they must tick a box to leave, it is close to universal. For marketers, the pre-selected option in a form or subscription carries real weight.
Assessment move
Collect five advertisements aimed at Hong Kong consumers and label each with the influence it works through: a reference person, a cultural value, a personality trait, a need level or a perception effect. Then name one you think fails and say why. Labeling mechanisms quickly is what lets a case analysis explain customer behavior instead of simply reporting it.
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