Consumer Behavior and Purchase Decision Making Process

Consumer behavior and purchase decision making process Every day we need to make a decissions – buy or not to buy anything. There are many things which helps us to make decissions like location, mood, advertisments and other. Consumer behavior is the mental and emotional processes and physical activities people engage in when they select, purchase, use, and dispose of products or services to satisfy particular needs and desires. A consumer goes through several stages before purchasing a product or service: 1. need; 2. information gathering/search; 3. evaluation of alternatives; . purchase of product/service; 5. post purchase evaluation. In my opinion, in this process there are two main steps – information gathering and evaluation of alternatives. These steps help to understand how much you need the product and how good it is. The buying process starts with comming needs. A need can be activated through internal or external stimuli. A need can also be aroused by an exter nal stimulus such as sight of a new thing in a shop while purchasing other things. Need is the most important factor which leads to buying of products and services.Need infact is the catalyst which triggers the buying decision of individuals. After need arousal, the consumer tries to solve it and gathers the sources and information about the product. Depending upon the intensity of need, it produces two states of individual. The first state is called heightened attention when the consumer becomes more receptive to the information regarding the item he needs. If a consumer needs to purchase a refrigerator, he will pay mere attention to fridge ads and the remarks made by friends and associates about fridges.If need is more intense, the individual enters a state of active information search and he tries to collect more information about the product, its key attributes, qualities of various brands and about the outlets where they are available. There are a lot of consumer information so urces like family, friends, advertisements, mass media, salesman. In my opinion, it is hard to arrange in the order wich one is the best source where get information about product. All these sources have pluses and minuses.If I prefer get information from family there is possibility that I do not get info about technical stuff. Or if I choose only salesman advice he can aggrandize about product advantages. That is why I recommend to take information as much as possible from every source. Having collected the information, the consumer clarify and evaluate the alternatives. There is, unfortunately no simple and single evaluation process used by all consumers or even by one consumer in all buying situations. Consumers can make choices based on their emotions and feelings.They elicit from memory their overall evaluations of products and choos the alternative for which they have the most positive feelings. One of the most current process of evaluation is to judge the product largely on a conscious and rational basis. Various considerations form the part of judgment such as product attributes, importance, weights, brand image, utility function for each attribute, and attitude and other. After evaluation of various alternatives, he takes the decision to buy or not to buy.Ofcourse, people can make choice on the spur of the moment, often without prior problem recognition. But I recommend going through all theese five steps focusing on information gathering and evaluation of alternatives. And always remember that the best impression about product you can get only after you try it. Izmantota literatura: http://www. managementstudyguide. com/consumer-decision-making-process. htm http://uwmktg301. blogspot. com/2010/01/evaluation-of-alternatives. html http://www. slideshare. net/Annie05/consumer-buying-behavior-and-decision-making-presentation