How Technology Affects The Way Consumers Make Decisions

This target market is outgoing, fluent in English, and highly value conscious3. They reside in urban areas with higher population densities and educational institutions. In terms of market segmentation, these young adults are the innovators and early adopters of new products and services. On a daily basis, being exposed to thousands of different messages makes them proactive and more aware of the world. They are heavily impacted by popular culture and being technologically savvy allows them to share their experiences on social media4.

Consumers are the centre of many marketers work. While the consumer is part of the marketing environment, it is also very important to recognise and understand the more personal and specific influences effecting consumers and the nature of the decision making process they use.

In this reading, I will be discussing the different categories in which advertisers have placed consumers to distinguish them from one another using their values, attitudes, and life-style. According to the writer of American culture and advertisement James B. Twitchell, “the object of much consumer research is not to try to twist their feathers so that they will flock to your product, but to position your product in such a place that they will have to fly by it and perhaps stop to roost. After roosting, they will eventually think that this is part of their flyway and return to it again and again” (p. 178). The proposition of stereotyping consumer lifestyles is a very effective way of marketing goods and services. The VALS2 strategy of marketing segment, target, and position used by advertisers is based on research; which means, marketers know more about consumer behaviors than what we think. This is an important issue because it’s necessary to raise awareness in society about the advantages and disadvantages that this can bring. After having evaluated all given points; this article is an eye opener for those who have any doubts about what consumers mean to large companies and advertisers.

Clearly, it is becoming a bigger part of e-commerce as a whole, resulting in marketing to flip on its head. The ever-growing number of consumers that shifted to mobile requires marketers to develop new strategies to attract and engage potential consumers who are on the go, or who prefer to use mobile devices for all types of online transactions.

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 first major impact of information technology, as we think of it today, was the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI, introduced in the late 1970s) to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. Later, with the development of the internet, the effect of information technology on consumer behavior could be seen in the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web via secure servers with e-shopping carts and with electronic pay services, like credit card payment authorizations. The Internet Boom: "First we must confront the question of what happened during the late 1990s. Viewed from 2003, such an

A company called YuMe Inc. has recently surveyed over 5,000 consumers to “understand how cultural, environmental and life events influence purchase behavior, media viewing habits, device preferences and the impact on consumer marketing.” In that research they were able to segment millennials which made then realize that “by segmenting into different consumer models, companies can focus on the individuals who actually show interest in their product”. This is great for companies in choosing which approach to take when trying to reach these millennials. The results in sales become greater because the reach to a certain segment becomes more accurate. According to Mike Randazzo’s article “What Influences and drives millennial purchasing behaviors” Randazzo found that “while there are common characteristics that define the entire generation, there are more depth and nuance to the audience that advertisers should be aware of in order to influence this segment and drive high engagement.” This shows that if advertisers begin to lump a generation, in particular the millennial generation, into one segment the results will be

The marketing channel has multiplied during the past few years due to digital boom. The advent of social media has ushered in a new age of marketing. In fact, the use of social media in business is no longer considered cutting edge—it's standard. (The New Age of Marketing, 2017). However, this does not necessarily mean that the traditional channels of marketing have become redundant.

In today’s world of various products and services, businesses aim to excel and lead the competition by marketing the most number of consumers, which is a full time endeavor of business. To survive in the market, a firm or an organization has to be constantly innovating and understand the latest consumer trends and tastes. Marketers need to understand consumer behavior because the decision-making process for consumers is anything but straight forward. Consumers’ behaviors and their purchasing patterns is a huge advantage to understanding the way customers think and the reason for their purchases. Therefore, the study of consumer behavior is important because it allows the

Despite the fact that we’re already in the 21st century, society continues to show signs of progress and development strongly leaning towards the direction of advancement, constantly evolving. This pattern is no different from the world of advertising, as it has also evolved through the years and quite recently an unexpected technological innovation took the world by storm. It made such a tremendous impact that eventually led to the transformation of traditional marketing, and it’s no other than social media that we all learned to love.

The constantly emerging of product, price, channel and messaging or/and creative differentiators in the business atmosphere inevitably contributes towards one’s product elimination or irrelevant. In those competitive edge scenario, marketers play as the devil advocates in manipulating and provoking consumer’s mind. They’re the one who have all the vital data regarding demographic (size, income, VALs,), purchasing power parity

The marketing industry is an elaborate network that links companies to their consumers, primarily through written communication. The main objective of marketing is to identify trends and patterns in consumer behavior, and utilize the data to influence consumers to purchase more goods. From a macroenviroment standpoint, the general conditions of a market are heavily dependent on global environmental factors. The most significant factor that influences the markets today is technological advancements. Since the release of Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and Myspace in the early 2000s, the number of people using social media has increased to over sixty-five percent. The ever-growing dependency on social media platforms, has given marketers the tremendous opportunity to further market potential consumers. Social media marketing is a specific form of marketing that focuses on producing ad content that social media users will post on their own networks. This particular marketing technique is effective because ads and content are created, based on what personal information users post on social media. Firms and organizations that advertise their brands on social media are more likely to increase their customer base and annual revenue. By doing so, companies are able to increase exposure of their brand and widen previous hidden, customer bases. As a marketer, the fine line between right and wrong is often blurred. The amount and

In today’s business world, social media is being discussed on a daily basis. This phenomenon has taken over the marketing and advertising industries and has changed the way they handle their efforts to attract customers. There is a big misunderstanding that social media are only popular networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” The rise of these online communities has given companies an opportunity to engage in conversations with their customers. This in

In the past 20 years, technology has grown like never before. The Internet started in the 1960s as a government project and has only grown in popularity. In 1995, there were 16 million Internet users, whereas in June of 2017, there were 3,885 million users. This means that approximately 51.7% of the world’s population is connected to the Internet today [Internet World Stats, 2017]. The mass amounts of exposure to technology, the World Wide Web, and e-commerce lead one to wonder what influence technology and social media have on consumerism and on a customer’s buying habits. Consumerism is influenced by many factors, but in the last decade website advertisements, social media platforms, and ecommerce websites have changed consumer behavior.

The prediction of a consumer’s personal traits or preferences is very difficult to get right, as it involves many different variables. This is illustrated by the Wheel of Consumer Behaviour devised by Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, & Hogg (2010), shown in figure 5.3. In order for a company to make a success of a product, they must be able to account for all the possible decisions and outcomes made by a prospective consumer. The successful planning and anticipation of the desired market needs can