‘Iphone’ Consumer Behavior
Chapter 1: Consumer Behavior Meeting Changes and Challenges
In today’s competitive world products are designed in away to appeal to customers, encouraging them to buy these products. As a result marketers and researchers spend a lot of time understanding and focusing on the product attributes. However it is not only the product attributes that influence buying behavior but is the customer too. Thus in order to design appealing products a marketer needs to understand the customer’s psychology, lifestyle, demographics, sociology and changing trends.
Understanding consumer behavior becomes vital if a company wants its products to satisfy a customer’s unmet and unrealized needs. Though each person is different
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Marketers use observational, experimental and survey methods to carry out their research depending on the objective.
With the changing and dynamic cell phone market Apple has to use market research to further improve the Iphone. Apple has to constantly stay close to its customers listening to their feedback, ideas and problems to keep the Iphone relevant to the changing trends and needs.
Ch.3 Market Segmentation and strategic marketing:
Market Segmentation:
Market segmentation is a way companies give themselves a direction. It helps marketer’s better design marketing mix and differentiate their offering. Increasing competition makes it important for companies to strategically differentiate their products and keep their costs low. Though the investment in segmenting, targeting and positioning is not very low, it mitigates the risk that marketers would face if they used mass marketing. Market segmentation is a process by which companies identity a substantial set of individuals with similar needs and characteristics who can be targeted. With market Segmenting companies can:
• Appropriately use resources towards a towards a potential market
• Design and develop a product that is in line with the market needs.
• Can select the appropriate method of communication that is most effective fot the targeted market.
• Marketers can understand and register changes and trends of targeted market and swiftly react to
Understanding the purchasing behavior of a specific demographic is one of the most important sets of research data available to marketers. To develop a strategic plan to present your products in a way that produces the most optimal buying behavior, one needs to understand what the target audience avoids as much as what triggers them to spend their money. (Marketing Land, 2014)
New top-end mobile phones such as the Apple Iphone are allowing a new class of mobile to emerge in the world today. Combined with its ease of use, rich design, and well-organized application system through Apple App Store makes the Iphone an appealing platform for development of other smartphones. The Apple IPhone was released on June 29, 2007 by CEO of Apple Steve Jobs (Honan). The IPhone offers many of the innovative features found on competing devices, but it also differs from other smartphones on the market.
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).
People think, desire and act different. Consumer psychology can be a study of costumer behavior. Market communication will involve in consumer psychology by media promoting and targeting people by the evidence collected. These articles represent that behavior that bring joy to people and creates a study of marketing based on those behaviors. Understanding consumer psychology behavior is a key to innovation to those products people desire, in a way of marketing to provide that special feature they are looking for.
They have a very clear strategy for the pursuit of their goal and vision. The market segmentation as well as the identification of target markets is the important element of each marketing strategy at which they are the basis for determining any particular of the marketing mix, which is product, pricing, place and promotion. Market segmentation reveals the company's market segment opportunities. The company has to evaluate the various segments and decide how many and which segments it can serve the best. In evaluating different market segments, a company must consider of three factors, that is, segment size and growth, segment structural attractiveness and also company’s objectives and resources. (Armstrong & Kotler, 2005)
In order to market the product into the market successfully, marketers need to have some marketing strategy to enter the desired market and make profit. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into subsets of consumers with common needs or characteristics (Schiffman et al., 2011). Understanding the market size and segmentation is valuable, but the keys to effective targeting is to know just how valuable specific consumer groups are, and being able to quantify the impact of consumer trends ( Berry, 1999).
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
Without saying, the iPhone does no less of a job than any of the smart phones out in the market. More importantly, Apple has re-demonstrated to the world that their logo represents innovation and reliability. The advantages of having a big brand name means that people know your product, and believe in it. What Apple has over small companies and startup companies is a financial leverage over them. Instead of mass advertisement, apple can feed more of its money into R & D which can allow them to fuel the economy with new innovating idea’s and products. Strengths: 1) Brand name- Highly recognized name from previous products like Apple computers and iPod & iTunes. Known for offering multi-functional, reliable and cutting edge products- that is design capabilities of products. 2) Capital- profits from its long established operations give iPhone financial leverage or R & D Startup Company’s lack. Weaknesses: Like almost all products, the iPhone is not entirely flawless. Its major weakness is its limited channels of distribution. Unlike the IPod, which are sold through many retailers, the iPhone canonly be sold in AT&T stores, T-mobile, and Apple stores. Although AT&T is the largest phone service provider in the United States, they only currently serve 58 million out of 2.14 billion cell phone subscribers. Besides for their poor channels of
As every customer has unique needs and expectations towards certain products, the ultimate goal of market segmentation is to organize customers into groups which allows targeting of customers with similar needs of and response to the products. The key is to minimize differentiation within each segment
The secondary market targets high school, college, and graduate students. For this market, it seems that the once popular iPod is now being replaced with the iPhone (1). We will examine the marketing mix: product, price, promotion, and place, to see if Apple is delivering the intended value to target customers. When researching the company’s environment, we will study the economic, political, cultural, technological, and natural forces in the company’s microenvironment (71). By researching all these aspects, we will get a better idea of how Apple continues to grow and market itself into a prosperous technological company. Apple’s iPhone interests us because it seems to be the cell phone that has the latest technical advancements, and can do more than just the average cell phone. By studying this company’s market perspective, we can get a better understanding of how Apple can continue to have the highest sales in the cell phone market.
The significance of understanding what a target market is and what targeting marketing is, is essential for an entrepreneur in a sense that they understand what product they have to sell and what service to render. Find problems that require solutions, paint a picture of the customer, who gains the value from your product, examine your market, look deeply into your product or service and evaluate what else is available (Lebof, G. (2011, March)). Be it one that is starting one’s own business; seek innovation and opportunity to expand business. Target marketing is the relevant tool to employ to (Kerr, M.
▪ Introduced in 2007 with AT&T as the exclusive provider ▪ 3G version launched in 2008 with
Then, Apple do a research on what people want on the phone and there come out the result that customers is expecting the phone that have function of PDA and function like portable minicomputer. In the same year, the world was shock with the new smartphone, iPhone introduced by Apple with the very strong point of different with their competitor. Apple places the iPhone as versatile, convenient, value added devices for personal and professional use. With only2 years, Apple has gain 18% of the market share which put them in 3rd place among all the smartphone company, then in 2011, even their market share is decrease to 13.8% which put them in second but there have a grow in sales for 250% from 2008 to 2011. The success of the apple is come with their positioning strategy.
Consumer decision-making is needs-based. Consequently, the process of understanding consumers does not so much rest on identifying the behavioural patterns of a group and then choosing to pitch a product to them, but rather on identifying the specific need which is common to certain people and accordingly striving to satisfy that need (Brady, 2010).
Market segmentation use to divide a large market into small markets that can develop company’s product and service to a specific group of consumer, including geographical, demographical, psychographical and behavioral. Then, have to go through market targeting and market positioning which are consists of a set of buyer who share common needs that the company decides to serve and a place that product occupies in consumer’s mind relative to competing products.