Consumer Behavior Unit 1

Three types or levels of cognitive learning:

(1) Accretion (2) Tuning (3) Restructuring

Types of general knowledge

(1) Episodic, concerning specific events in a person's life (2) Semantic general knowledge, facts about something.

Two types of knowledge

(1) General knowledge about their environment and behaviors and (2) procedural knowledge about how to do things.

Three types of product knowledge

(1) Knowledge about attributes or characteristics of products (2) positive consequences or benefits of using products (3) values the product helps consumers satisfy or archieve

Four levels of product knowledge

(1) Product class (2) Product form (3) Brand (4) Model/features

Process of measuring means-end chains

(1) Research must identify or elicit the product attributes that are most important to each consumer when he or she makes a purchase decision (2) An interview process called laddering, designed to reveal how the consumer associates product attributes with more abstract consequences and values.

Two types of knowledge structures

(1) Schemas, contain mostly episodic and semantic general knowledge (2) Scripts, organized networks of procedural knowledge.

Ways consumers come into contact with information about products and services.

(1) Through direct personal use experience. (2) Vicarious product experience (indirectly by observing others using the product) (3) Interpreting product-related information from mass media

The amount of perceived risk a consumer experiences is influenced by two things

(1) the degree of unpleasantness of the negative consequences (2) the likelihood that these negative consequences will occur.

Five implications of viewing consumer processes as a reciprocal system

1) Any comprehensive analysis of consumers must consider all 3 elements and the relationships among them. 2) Any of the 3 elements may be the starting point for consumer analysis. 3) because the view is dynamic, it recognizes that consumers can continuously change, which can involve continuous research to detect changes that could influence marketing strategies 4) consumer analysis can be applied at several levels. 5) this framework for analyzing consumers highlights the importance of consumer research and analysis in developing marketing strategies.

3 Reasons why companies are making changes to serve consumers better

1) Competition from foreign companies with better quality and lower prices 2) Dramatic increase in quality of consumer and marketing research 3) Development of Internet as a marketing tool

Three cognitive processes involved in consumer decision making

1) Consumers must *interpret* relevant information in the environment to create personal knowledge of meaning. 2) Consumers must combined or *integrate* this knowledge to evaluate products or possible actions and to choose among alternate behaviors. 3) Consumers must *retrieve product knowledge from memory* to use in integration and interpretation processes.

Five characteristics of how affective system operates

1) it is largely reactive. It cannot plan, make decisions, or purposefully try to achieve a goal. 2) People have little direct control over their affective responses. They can have indirect control by modifying behavior that is triggering the affect. 3) Affective responses are felt physically in the body. (butterflies) 4) The affective system can respond to virtually any type of stimulus. 5) Most affective responses are learned. Only few basic affective responses such as preferences for sweets seem to be innate.

Marketing Strategy (Consumer Analysis POV)

A set of stimuli placed in consumers' environments designed to influence their affect, cognition, and behavior.

Spreading Activation

Activation of one meaning concept may trigger related concepts and activate those meanings as well.

Reciprocal System

Any of the elements (affect & cognition, consumer environment, consumer behavior) can be either a cause or an effect of a change at any particular time.

Tuning

As consumers gain experience with a product, knowledge structures tend to become larger and more complex through accretion processes. At some point, consumers may adjust their knowledge structures to make them more accurate and more generalizable. Can occur when parts of a knowledge structure are combined and given a new overall meaning.

Benefits

Bare the desirable consequences consumers seek when buying and using products and brands

ZMET: Vignette

Consumers are asked to create a short movie or one act play that expresses their thoughts and feelings about the topic. Consumers are told to make a product or brand a character in the story.

ZMET: Pre-interview instruction

Consumers are told several days before their interview to select 6-8 pictures that express their thoughts and feelings about a topic or issue.

ZMET: Digital image

Consumers create a summary collage of the most meaningful pictures (metaphors) they brought to the interview. Can be done digitally then manipulated into a collage. Then the consumer narrates a detailed description of the image and its meaning.

ZMET: Storytelling

Consumers tell stories about each picture that reveal the affective and cognitive meanings of that visual metaphor and thus the focal topic.

Interpretive Approach

Cultural Anthropology. Tries to understand consumption and its meanings using methods like long interviews and focus groups.

Marketing Science Approach

Economics/Statistics. Tries to predict consumer choice and behavior using methods like simulation and math-modeling.

Affect responses

Emotions (love or anger), feeling states [specific feelings] (satisfaction or frustration), moods (boredom, relaxation), attitudes [evaluations] (like or dislike)

consumer environment

Everything external to consumers that influences what they think, feel, and do.

Procedural knowledge

How to do things, stored as an "if... then.." link between a concept or an event and an appropriate behavior.

ZMET: Expand the frame

Interviewer asks consumers to pretend the frame around a picture is expanded so more things come into view. Consumer is then asked what things will come into the picture to help understand the thoughts and feelings around the topic.

ZMET: Sensory Images

Interviewer elicits metaphors based on the other senses. Consumers are asked to describe a scent, sound, taste, and touch that would express their thoughts and feelings about the topic.

Means-end chain

Links consumers' knowledge about product attributes with their knowledge about consequences and values. It proposes that the meaning of a product attribute is given by its perceived consequences.

Accretion

Most common type of cognitive learning. As consumers interpret information about products and services, they add knowledge, meanings, and beliefs to their existing knowledge structures.

Social consequences

My friends will envy me if I buy this HD big screen TV.

Implementing the Marketing Concept

Organizations must understand their customers and stay close to them to provide products and services that consumers will purchase and use immediately.

Automatic Processing

Over time, cognitive processes gradually become habitual and require less capacity and conscious control.

Limited Capacity

People can consciouscly consider only a small amount of knowledge at one time.

Instrumental values

Preferred modes of conduct.

Traditional Approach

Psychology/Sociology. Tries to explain consumer decision making and behavior through methods like experiments and surveys.

Knowledge, meanings, and beliefs

Refer to consumers' subjective understanding of information produced by interpretation processes.

Affect

Refers to consumer feelings about stimuli and events, such as whether they like or dislike a product. They involve the strongest feelings, (emotions), such as love or anger. Less strong feeling states (specific feelings) such as satisfaction or frustration (Moods), such as boredom or relaxation and milder overall attitudes (evaluations) such as liking McDonalds Frenchfries.

Cognition

Refers to consumer thinking, such as their beliefs about a particular product.

Marketing Concept

Suggests an organization should satisfy consumer needs and wants to make profits.

Marketing Strategy

The design, implementation, and control of a plan to influence exchanges to achieve organizational objectives.

Benefit segmentation

The process of dividing consumers into subgroups or market segments according to their desires for certain product consequences.(whiter teeth, preventing tooth decay)

Information-processing models

These models identify a sequence of cognitive processes in which each process transforms or modifies information and passes it on to the next process, where additional operations take place.

Sources of learned affective responses.

They learn them through classical conditioning processess, childhood, cultures, subcultures, and other social groups.

Consumers see most product attributes as

a means to some end. The end could be a consequence or a more abstract value.

Intrinsic self-relevance

based on consumers' means-end knowledge stored in memory.

unconscious

below the level of conscious awareness

Integration processes

concern how consumers combine different types of knowledge (1) to form overall evaluations of products, other objects, and behaviors and (2) to choose among alternative behaviors, such as a purchase.

Perceived risks

concern the undesirable consequences that consumers might want to avoid when they buy and use products.

Product knowledge and involvement

concern the various types of knowledge, meanings, and beliefs about products that are stored in consumers' memories.

General knowledge

concerns people's interpretations of relevant information in their environments. Stored in memory as links or connections between two concepts.

Associative networks

created by our cognitive systems, they organize and link many types of knowledge together.

ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique)

elicits metaphors from consumers that reveal their deep meanings (both cognitive and affective) about a topic. Steps include (1) The pre-interview instruction (2) Storytelling (3) Expand the frame (4) Sensor images (5) Vignette (6) Digital image

Attention

governs how consumers select which information to inrepret and which information to ignore.

Restructuring

involves the revision of an entire associative network of knowledge, which might include creation of entirely new meaning structures and/or reorganization of an old knowledge structure. usually involves extension cognitive effort and substantial thinking and reasoning processes. (Rare)

Situatuonal self-relevance

is determined by aspects of the immediate physical and social environment that activate important consequences and values, thus making products and brands seem self-relevant.

Cognitive Learning

occurs when people interpret information in the environment and create new knowledge or meaning.

Values

people's broad life goals. Often involves the emotional affect associated with such goals and needs (strong feelings and emotions that accompany success)

Terminal values

preferred states of being or broad psychological states.

Psychosocial consequences

refer to the psychological and social outcomes of product use. Psychological consequences of product use are internal personal outcomes, such as how the product makes you feel.,

Involvement

refers to consumers' perceptions of importance or personal relevance for an object, event, or activity.

Comprehension

refers to how consumers determine the subjective meanings of information and thus create personal knowledge and beliefs.

Activation

refers to how product knowledge is retrieved from memory for use in interpreting and integrating information.

Behavior

refers to the physical actions of consumers that can be directly observed and measured by others. Also called over behavior to distinguish it from mental activities, such as thinking, that cannot be observed directly.

Interpretation processes

require exposure to information and involve two related cognitive processes: attention and comprehension.

Functional consequences

tangible outcomes of using a product that consumers experience rather directly. (eating a bigmac satisfies hunger. Drinking pepsi eliminates thirst)

Consumer Behavior

the dynamic interaction of affect and cognition, behavior, and the environment by which human beings conduct the exchange aspects of their lives. (thoughts and feelings people experience and actions they perform in consumption processes)

Levels of Product Knowledge

used by consumers to interpret new infromation and make purchase choices. Levels of knowledge are formed when people acquire separate meaning concepts (accretion process) and combine them into larger, more abstract categories of knowledge (tuning)