Stages Of The Buyer Decision Process

How will a consumer decide whether to purchase a good? When a consumer purchases a good, what does this reveal?

Research suggests that customers go through a five-stage decision-making process when making any purchase. This is summarised in the diagram below:

F. Contrast how a person would initially respond to a relatively large increase in the price of a product in the short run as opposed to how that same person might react to that same price increase over a longer time horizon (i.e., the long run), using the “Consumer's Time Horizon” concept.

|  managerial approach of seller, capacity of seller to do the work, and ability of seller to make a reasonable make-or-buy decision.

In the case of Stephanie Riesling, you can see the consumer go through the five steps of the consumer decision process as she goes through the journey of purchasing a new car. Stephanie is a senior about to graduate college, in the consumer decision making process, she is about to embark in a life stage change. This leads her to recognize her need for a new car. The next phase of the process was information search, she was not sure what car she wanted to purchase, but knew she needed something that was nice looking, in her price range and was known to last a long time. She narrowed her car search down to a consideration set of four vehicles. She did a lot of external searches for information, using non-marketing sources. She used personal sources from acquaintances and independent sources like consumer reports. She has a high involvement in the determination of information search, since this was an expensive purchase for herself. The consumer final reaches the third step of the process and had the it narrowed down to one car brand, but had alternative things to consider, like features on the car and the color of the car. She had an evaluation criterion that she set of things that must be on the car and the rest was negotiable depending on cost. Based on the case it sounds like the consumer

Consumer are alert for saving. They are always on the look out to find the best prices and best quality to buy for themselves.

Today’s sellers are struggling to control the sales process, a phenomenon that gradually raised the last years as buyers have become highly demanding. Buyers have access on the web, seeking for information before they take a purchasing decision and they expect sellers to follow them in all stages – where they have been, what they saw, how long they stayed and what channel they used.

If a buyer represents a large percentage of the supplier’s sales, the buyer has more bargaining power over the supplier. Rogers’s chocolate 50% of sales is contributed from its 11 retail stores which is a strong one. However, since the previous president Mr. Jim Ralph had grown its wholesale market up to 30% thus, they have to take a good care of its

We are part of a tremendous consumer culture that thrives on the latest trends and has an incessant need to be satisfied, this can be seen in standard economics through the supply and demand model. Indeed, the more the market demands the more is supplied to meet said demands; thus there is a never-ending cycle that occurs between the supplier and the consumer. However, this raises the question: What guides consumers in their transactions?

The question that was asked at the beginning of the study was, “When the typical person engages in a consumer transaction (usually as a buyer), does he or she try to avoid dealing with minority sellers, and does he/she treat minority sellers differently?”

The economical drive theories this research project will investigate are that of Kotler, Bowen and Makens (2006) and the consumer decision process. Looking in detail the 5 different steps required in order to analyse a consumers spending behaviour and what influences them. The other part of this project is to look into the social influences and the theory provided by Schiffman and Kanuk (2007), which investigates different factors which influence a variety of decision processes.

Everyday, every minute, and every second consumers are making decisions on whether or not they should purchase a given product. The product could be as small as a candy bar to as big as a car. The processes that flow inside the mind of a consumer when making a decision is both psychologically and economically based. So, understanding the process is central to making rationally based decisions. However, this decision is not only important to the consumer purchasing the product, it’s also of important significance to the marketers and policy makers. Reasons why making decisions can be so difficult is that the consumer is dealt with many alternatives, and with the rapid pace in technology this is making it more difficult.

According to (Blythe,2008) “consumer behaviour is when people obtain, consume and dispose of products and services.” Pg.5 identically the same when business travellers consume and make a purchase from the service.

The behavior in which a consumer keeps buying a product time and again instead of buying products from other competitive companies is called Brand Loyalty. Brand loyalty can often be termed as Customer Loyalty, Brand Commitment, Product Loyalty etc. Brand Loyalty is seen among consumers when they realize that the product is better than the other products that are available in the market. This affinity of a consumer towards a particular product is considered to be brand loyalty. Although, this consumer behavior is not limited to a simple repetition of a purchase, there is also a psychological reasoning behind the consumers’ affinity towards behavior.

The main difference between consumer buyer behaviour and organisational buyer behaviour is that consumer buying consists of activates involved in buying and using of products for personal and household use, where organisational buyers purchase primarily for organisational purpose.