The Black Box Model: Buyer-Response Model Of Consumer Behavior

Professor John Maule from the University of Leeds describes new research into the way that consumers choose a product.

The fundamental factors that were identified to develop the psychological processes include perception, learning, memory, thinking, emotion and motivation (Sternberg 1996). Following the structure of the SOR model, Howard first (1969) proposed the consumer decision-making model (Richarme, M., 2005), which was further developed to be the ‘Theory of Buyer Behaviour’ (Howard et al., 1973). The model considered environment stimulus as variables impacting consumes, and was triggered from various sources. These inputs included core elements of products such as price, quality that the buyer truly confronts (Loudon et al., 1993) as well as symbolic stimuli resulted from advertising. Besides, social stimuli including family, peer and other reference groups also influence consumers before entering the decision process (Foxall 1990). In contrast, Engel et al (1995) did not focus on environmental factors, but paid more attention to the hypothetical construction of the decision process that was the main organism being influenced by inputs. The entire organism was structured around a seven-point decision process: need recognition followed by an internally and externally information search, the evaluation of alternatives, purchase, post purchase reflection and disposal. Aligning with Howard (1973), mainly two factors significantly affected these decisions. First, market stimuli affected consumer’s information process which was

14) The attitudes and behavior patterns of consumers making a purchasing decision are part of the

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.

Consumer behaviour is the study of how individuals, groups and organizations select, buy, use and dispose of goods, services, ideas or experiences to satisfy their needs and wants. The emerging costumer trends play an important role in analysing the marketing opportunities. A consumer buying behaviour is influenced by cultural, social and personal factors. The consumer passes through five stages of the buying decision process: Problem Recognition, Information Search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behaviour. This model is important for anyone making marketing decision and customer pass through all stages in every purchase.

There are two models that we will analyze in this essay to see which is the most suitable approach to understand consumer behaviour, they are cognitive and behavioural models, there are actually three models lies within initial decisions of consumer behavior, the third one is reinforcement model but in this case we will not analyze it. First of all, the way of starting off the essay is by defining both cognitive and behavioural models found from the journals, followed by comparison between the two models, which are the best to understand consumer behaviour, giving advantages and disadvantages of the two models. The third part is to decide which is the most suitable approach to understand consumer behaviour and give reasons to the answer.

The buying process starts with need recognition. The buyer recognizes a problem or need. A need can be triggered by external stimuli. For example, an advertisement can develop a person’s need to make a purchase. The marketer at this stage should research consumer needs in order to determine what kinds of needs or problems arise and how they lead the consumer in making a particular product decision (Armstrong & Philip, 2012).

Purchaser choice making changes with the kind of purchasing choice. There are extraordinary contrasts between purchasing toothpaste, a tennis racket, a PC, and another auto. Perplexing and extravagant buys are prone to include more purchaser consideration and more members.

Every decision a consumer makes, whether to purchase or not, will be influenced by a number of factors. Consumers today experience a wide variety of messages (stimuli) from marketers across many different mediums.

In these modern days, consumers are bombarded with brands and advertising from different companies and they have a lot more options when it comes to purchasing a product. They usually rely on both intrinsic and extrinsic cues to solve their problem regarding to the quality of products. Consumers have to make their purchasing decision under various uncertainties and circumstances regarding to the product itself and its attributes as Cox (1962, p. 413) stated that ‘consumer 's task in evaluating a product is to use cues from the array as the basis for making judgments about the product’.

The black box model shows the interaction of stimuli, consumer characteristics, and decision process and consumer responses. It can be distinguished between inter personal stimuli (between people) or intrapersonal stimuli (within people). The black box model is closely related to the black box theory of behaviourism, where the focus is not set on the processes inside a consumer, but the relation between the stimuli and the response of the consumer. The marketing stimuli are planned and processed by the companies, whereas the environmental stimulus is given by social factors, based on the economic, political and cultural circumstances of a society (Chuahan, 2013). The central aim of effective marketing management is to discover what goes on in the mind of the customer- the black box (source).

Consumer behaviour examines how individuals acquire, use and dispose of company offerings (Noel 2009). Acquiring a product or service is not the only consideration of consumer behaviour but the various stages and processes before these offerings are bought.

Consumer behaviour is always a crucial part for business firm development. International firms invest myriad of money to understand their customers, in order to satisfy the need and wants of customers. For example, IKEA, the world’s leading home furnishing company, spent a total of £30 million in 2012. It aims to improve the shopping experience for customers, including the bedroom showroom redesign. It is crystal clear that consumer behaviour plays a vital part in the success or failure of a product. Meanwhile, consumer behaviour is a process which consumers go through when they make purchases and it involves numerous factors that influence their decisions. As a consumer, we make decisions every day. Some are far-reaching while others may be trivial and inconsequential. However, we all know that human beings are irrational, our preferences often deviate from rationality in the standard economics. We often make the wrong decision and it may bring unfavourable consequences along with negative side effects. There are countless reasons for making irrational decisions. One of the most astonishing arguments I recently discovered is that people feel the pain of loss more acutely than they feel the pleasure of gain. Why this happened ? For instance, when we buy a sofa from IKEA, they often provide a 30 days money-back guarantee. However, even if we noticed that the sofa has imperfections, we seldom go back and return. Why ? It is because we consider returning the sofa as a loss. A

The value of studying the consumer behavior is that it gives vital information to an organization for designing an effective marketing strategy. The way a consumer thinks, perceives, decides and is influenced is important in designing of promotional campaigns for any product.

This subsection focuses on psychological factors that influence consumer behavior. In the latter subsection, it concerns social factors that would influence consumer behaviour.