1. Consumer markets and buying
behaviour

2. What influences consumer behaviour?
• Cultural factors- Culture; sub culture; social class
• Social factors-reference groups; family; social roles and status
• Personal factors
Age and stage in life cycle
Occupation and economic circumstances
Personality and self concept
Lifestyle and values

3. Key psychological processes
Motive: A need that is sufficiently pressing to
drive a person to act.
Freud: Psychological forces shaping people’s
behaviour are largely unconscious.
Maslow: Hierarchy of needs
Herzborg: Dissatisfiers and satisfiers. Absence of
dissatisfiers alone not enough

4. Key psychological processes
• Perception: The process by which a person selects,
organizes, and interprets information to create a
meaningful picture of the world.
• Can vary widely among individuals exposed to the
same reality.
• Selective attention/ distortion
• Learning-change in behaviour arising from experience
• Memory- associative network model-STM and LTM
• Retrieval

5. Actors in the buying process
• Initiators
• Influencers
• Deciders
• Buyers
• Users

6. The buying decision process
• 5 stage model
Problem recognition
Information search
Evaluation of alternatives
Purchase decision
Post purchase behaviour

7. Decision sets
• Total set
• Awareness set
• Consideration set
• Choice set
• Decision

8. Other theories
• Level of consumer involvement: High/ low
involvement; Variety seeking behaviour
• Decision heuristics and biases
i) The availability heuristic
ii) The representativeness heuristic
iii) The anchoring and adjustment heuristic
Mental accounting