Children may also have strong influence on family buying decision. For example children as young as age six may influence on the family car purchase decision. “By six, they know the names of cars,” says an industry analyst. Chevrolet recognizes this influence in marketing its Chevy Venture minivan.
Roles and status: The consumer's position in each group can be defined in terms of both role and status. A role consists of the activities people expected to perform according to persons around them. Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society. People often choose products that show their status in society.
Personal Factor
A consumer's decision also are influenced by personal characteristics such as the consumer's age and life cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, personality and self concept:
- Age and life cycle stage: People change the goods and services they buy over their lifetimes. Taste in food. Clothes, furniture, and recreation are often age related. Buying is also shaped by the stage of family life cycle. Traditional family life cycle stages include young singles and married couples with children. Sony recently overhauled its marketing approach in order to target products services to consumers based on their life stages.
- Occupation: A consumer's occupation affects the goods and services bought. Blue collar workers tend to buy more rugged work clothes, whereas executives buy more business suits.
- Economic situation: A consumer's economic situation will affect product choice. If economic indicator point to recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition, and reprice their products closely.
- Lifestyle: People coming from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may have quite different lifestyles. Lifestyle is a consumer's pattern of living as expressed in his or her psychographics. It involves consumer's activities, interest and opinions. When used carefully, the lifestyle concept can help the marketer changing consumer values and how they affect buying behavior.
- Personality and self concept: Each consumer's distinct personality influences his or her buying behavior. Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and lasting response to one's own environment. For example, coffee marketer have discovered that heavy coffee drinker tend to be high on sociability. Thus Starbucks and other coffee houses create environments in which people can relax and socialize over a cup of steaming coffee.
Psychological Factor
A consumer's buying choices are further influenced by four major psychological factors:
- Motivation: A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity. A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
- Perception: A motivated person is ready to act. How the person acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form meaningful picture of the world.
- Learning: When people act, they learn. Learning describes change in individual's behavior arising from experience.
- Beliefs and Attitudes: Through doing and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes. A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something. Marketers are interested in the beliefs that people formulate about specific products and services, because these beliefs make up product and brand images that affect buying behavior.
Attitude describes a person's relatively consistent evaluations, feelings and tendencies toward an object or idea. Attitudes put people into a frame of mind liking or disliking things, or moving toward or away from them.
