Consumer Behavior Case Study-Reference Groups

which lead  to  the decline  in sales for isnack 2.0. The lack of connection with consumers

Hoyer, W. D., MacInnis, D. J., & Pieters, R. (2012). Consumer Behavior, 6e, 6th Edition.

Jay Matheson is apple college representative and is also attending Lynn to earn his doctorate degree. He also spoke about the important of being able to set yourself apart from everyone else. The quote he said that stuck out to me was powerful personal brand will set you apart from the crowd. He spoke about how brands are not the label or product. He said that the brand is not what they say it is which is from the company’s standpoint and then said what the customers say is what they say it is. The last thing that I toke from what he said was the top five brands that impacted us are apple, Starbucks, Wikipedia, Google, and Facebook.

A reference group is any person or group that serves as a point of comparison (or reference) for an individual in forming either general or specific values, attitudes, or a specific guide for behavior. They help us understand the impact of other people on an individual’s consumption beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. It helps marketers choose their methodology to affect desired changes in consumer behavior. From a marketing perspective, reference groups are groups that serve as frames of reference for individuals in their purchase or consumption decisions. Reference groups that influence general or broadly defined values or behavior are called normative reference groups. Reference groups that serve as benchmarks for specific or narrowly

A brand is a portfolio of qualities associated with a name, which in turn invokes certain images to individuals and hold values beyond the benefits of a product (Iacobucci, 2018). Brand association occurs when customers make a cognitive or emotional association with a particular brand. For instance, when a customer sees a certain color, symbol, logo, or name they automatically can make a connection to a particular brand. Brands start with a name that conveys information, suggest their benefits, or can even be named after their founders (Iacobucci, 2018). In the marketing perspective marketers can control the brand which they are marketing by using catching logos, colors, slogans, or even the products shape and appearance. In marketing a marketer can control the message they are trying to convey but cannot really have control over an individual’s association with that particular brand. Once a customer has an association with a particular brand they may favor the brand based on a past experience or even that individual’s sense of style or they may dislike a brand because of an association they

When staff arrived to 208 Nick was finishing getting dressed. Staff monitored Nick as he self-administered his medication. Staff helped nick put together a schedule for the evening. Nick was provided visuals to help make choices for a preferred activity as well as dinner items. Staff then helped Nick develop a grocery list and then prompted him to pack his bag for swimming. Nick independently located all of the necessary items for the gym and then headed there. Nick was reminded of behavioral expectation prior to entering ACAC. He navigated into the building and then verbally checked in. Nick was reminded to pack off of his belongings in his locker before heading to the poo area. Nick enjoyed his time swimming as he displayed a positive affect.

think the consumers want (or what they think they can tell them they want), to

Understanding consumer behaviour is essential to succeed in business. As Solomon et al. (2013) stresses, businesses exist to satisfy consumer’s needs. By identifying and understanding the factors that influences their customers, firms have the opportunity to develop a more efficient strategy, marketing message and advertising campaigns that is more in line with the needs and ways of thinking of their target consumers (Perreau, 2015).

The basic myth of our culture is that consumption is the goal of life” (gtd. In Glickman). Consumption is an important aspect of everyday life as we are continuously consuming products. The clothes we wear, the food we eat and the devices we use to communicate with people are produced by companies for our consumption. Companies turn to advertising agencies to come up with ways to effectively market their products and create demand. Advertisement agencies make use of profiling and niche marketing to target the groups of customers that the product will appeal to (McFall 5). Advertisers use societal stereotypes, for example, gender stereotypes to link a particular product to a group of consumers in order to create a demand for the product.

As Keller (1993, p. 3) argues, “[…] perceptions about a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer memory”. Keller (1998) also suggests that there are three categories that constitute the overall brand perception: attributes; benefits and attitudes. A study conducted by Simms and Trott (2006) explores the brand perception of the MINI stakeholders. Based on their findings researchers established a model that gives a “perspective on a product brand by linking specific brand associations to the image that is developed in the mind of the consumer or stakeholder, and finally linking this to how the image appeals to key stakeholders” (Simms and Trott, 2006) . The application of their model to the MINI brand is presented in Appendix 2. .

With a viewpoint like that, he convinced that as they put an end to “roost”, it will turn into the customers standard and they will come back to the product over and over again. Advertisement is a way to pass on the word to the common people about specific products. If we were to take a glance surrounding our local grocery store, we will see numerous goods that we are well known with. In this article, advertising goes into much more complexity than just putting a product up for sale to the public. Twitchell centers on the subgroups that advertisers use to produce and position their ads. Each and every one of us qualifies into what is named the “VALS” system, which arranges consumers by purchasing cravings. There are three principal groups, as well as eight sub-groups, all of which can be constructed into many combinations of consumer. Twitchell also uses diagrams to describe the different kinds of buyer. The main subjects of the article were, “Mass production equals mass marketing equals creation of mass stereotypes” as well as “different products have different meanings to different audiences” (193). The Principle-Oriented group, which is the first group, is made up of three classes, which are Actualizers,

Consumerism and the effects of branding affect people’s lives. Branding allows consumers to easily identify which products are made by which companies. Yet, the brands create more of an influence on consumer’s lifestyles and in the end decide what kind of consumer that person is. Branding creates a blurred divide in our society. Consumers who are ore likely to purchase the branded products that are associated with better quality and higher prices are put into their own category bucket versus the consumers who choose the cheaper priced products that are made with less quality. When it comes to deciding who you are based off of the products and brands that you associate yourself with, it creates a capital divide in our society. Consumers than associate brands with personal feelings based upon whether or not they associate themselves with those brands. Lives of consumers are heavily influenced. Their lives are worse off when they feel the need to ‘keep up’ with brands in order to feel as if they are portraying themselves in the best light. In a way, this is similar to how all of branding began with livestock. Consumers want to physically brand themselves with specific brands by wearing logos and identifying with a brand. They might not be burning the brands directly onto their skin but they are burning the brands onto their clothes and burning holes in their wallets to keep up with society standards about brands.

This case study included information on a sample of fifty credit card accounts. This information, table one, included household size, annual income, and the amount charged to the account. Scatter plots of the data were produced. Figure one shows household size vs. amount charged. This graph shows that the positive linear relationship of the data is somewhat strong. The r squared is 0.56, analyzing the graph there is a correlation of household size to amount charged, but there is a range per household size.

In order to understand what reference group influences are, it is necessary to firstly understand what a reference group is. The depth of information surrounding reference groups and the influences they poses on individuals, particularly on consumer purchasing behaviour is vast and one could get lost in the mist of it all. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that only research relevant to this study is included in this section, thus an overview of what a reference group is will be provided, then the different types of reference groups will be explored based on previous research, then the data will start to look at the influences reference groups have on individuals, and their purchasing behaviour, in order to fully understand the power that reference groups have.

In consumer behavior study, the construct brand personality has received a considerable amount of attention, defined in Aaker’s (1997) article as the “set of human characteristics associated with a brand”. This idea is well accepted by most proactitioners and marketing academics (Aaker, 1997; Carr, 1996; Duboff, 1986; Durgee, 1988; Kassarjian, 1971; Levy, 1959; Ogilvy, 1988; Plummer, 1985; Sirgy, 1982) for decades, and now has become an important topic of marketing research because of its implementation in consumer behavior theory: differentiating a brand in a product category (Plummer, 1984), enhancing consumers ' preference and loyalty to a brand (Fournier, 1998), and creating brand equity (Keller, 1993). It also has impacts on influencing brand recognition, brand beliefs such as perceived quality (Ramaseshan and Tsao, 2007), and brand associations (Freling and Forbes, 2005).