Culture: Culture is the set of basic value, perception, wants and behaviors learned by a member of society from family and other institution. Culture is the most basic cause of a person's wants and behavior. Every group or society has a cultural influence on buying behavior may vary greatly from country to country, or even neighborhood to neighborhood.

For example, when business representative of a US community trying to market itself to Taiwan learned a hard cultural lesson. Seeking more foreign trade, they arrived in Taiwan bearing gifts of green baseball caps. It turned out that the trip was scheduled a month before Taiwan elections, and that green was the color of the political opposition party. Worse yet, that according to Taiwan culture, a man wears green to signify that his wife has been unfaithful.

Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts in order to discover new product that might be wanted. For example, the shift toward informality has resulted more demand for casual clothing and simpler home furnishing.

Subculture: Each culture contains smaller subcultures. Subculture is a group of people with shared value system based on common life experiences and situations. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions. For example of important subcultures include Hispanic, African American, Asian and Mature consumers.

1. Hispanic consumers: Americans of Cuban, Mexican, Central American, South American and Puerto Rican descent, ought more than $425 billion worth of goods and services each year. Hispanics have long been a target of food, beverages, and household care products. Most marketer now produce products tailored to the Hispanic market and promote them using Spanish language and media.
2. African American consumers: Although more price conscious than other segments, African American consumers are also strongly motivated by quality and selection. African American consumers place more importance on brand names, are more bran loyal and do less shopping around. In recent years, many companies have developed special products and services, packing and appeals to meet the needs of these consumers. A wide variety of magazines, television channels, and other media now target this consumer segment.
3. Asian American consumers: Asian American consumer is the fastest growing and most affluent U.S. demographic segment, now number more than 10 million, with a disposable income of $229 billion annually. Until recently, packaged good firms, automobile companies, retailers, and fast food chains have legged in this consumer segment. Wal-mart for example, in one Seattle store, where the Asian American consumer represent over 13 percent, they stocks a large selection of CDs and videos of Asian artist, Asian favored health and beauty products, and children's learning video that feature multiple language tracks.
4. Mature Consumers: As the U.S population ages, mature consumers are becoming a very attractive market. Now 75 million strong, the 50 and older population will swell to 115 million in the next 25 years. Mature consumer re better off financially and have more spare time than are younger consumer groups, and because of that they are an ideal market for exotic travel, restaurant and high-tech home entertainment. Their desire to look as young as they feel also make more mature consumers good candidates for cosmetics and personal care products, health foods, fitness product, and other items that combat the effect of aging.

Social Class

Almost every society has some form of social class structure. Social classes are society's relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interest, and behaviors. Social class is not determined by single factor, but is measure as combination of occupation, income, education, wealth, and other variables. Social classes show distinct product and brand preferences in areas such as clothing, home, furnishing, leisure activity, and automobiles.

Social Factor

A consumer's behavior also is influenced by social factors, such as the consumer's groups, family, and social roles and status.

Groups: A consumer's behavior is influenced by many small groups. A group can be defined as two or more people who interact to accomplish individual or mutual goals. Groups that have direct influence and to which a person belongs are called membership groups. In contrast, reference groups serve as direct or indirect points of comparison or reference in forming a consumer's attitudes or behavior.

Manufactures of products and brands subjected to strong group influence must figure out how to reach opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are persons within reference group who, because of special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exerts influence on others. In other case, marketers may use buzz marketing by enlisting or even creating opinion leaders to spread the word about their brands.

Family: Family member can strongly influence consumer's behavior. Husband- wife involvement varies widely by product category and by stage in the buying process. In the United States, the wife traditionally has been the main purchasing agent for the family, especially in the areas of food, household products, and clothing.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Learning: When people act, they learn. Learning describes change in individual's behavior arising from experience.
4. 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.

In order to produce superior value and satisfaction for costumers, companies need information at every turn. Good products and marketing programs begin with thorough understanding of consumer needs and wants. Companies also need an abundance information on competitors, resellers and other actors and forces in the marketplace.

Marketers are viewing information not only as an input for making a better decision but also as an important strategic asset and marketing tool. Competitor will not be able to duplicate the company's information and intellectual capital.

In today's more rapidly changing environments, manager need up to date information to make timely high quality decisions. Companies must design effective marketing information systems that give managers the right information, in the right form, at the right time to help them make better marketing decisions. A good marketing information systems consist of people, equipment, and procedures o gather, sort analyze, evaluate and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers.

Assessing Marketing Information Needs

The marketing information system primarily serves the company's marketing and other managers. However, it may also provide information to external partners, such as suppliers or marketing services agencies.

A good marketing information system balances the information users would like to have against what they really need and what is feasible to offer. The marketing information system must monitor the marketing environment in order to provide decision makers with information they should have to make key marketing decisions. Sometimes the company cannot provide the needed information, either because it is not available or because of marketing information system limitations. For example, a brand manager might want to know how competitors will change their advertising budgets next year and how these will affect industry market share.

The cost of obtaining, processing, storing and delivering information can mount quickly. The company must decide whether the benefit of having additional information are worth the cost of providing it, and both value and cost are often hard to assess. Marketers should not assume that additional information will always be worth obtaining. They should weigh carefully the cost of additional information against the benefit resulting from it.

Obtaining Marketing Information

Marketers can obtain the needed information from internal data, marketing intelligence, and marketing research.

Internal data: Many companies build extensive internal data base. Internal data base is electronic collections of information obtained from data source within the company. Information in the database can come from many sources, for example, detailed record of sales, cost and cash flow from accounting department and costumer demographics, psychographics, and buying behavior from marketing department. Research studies done for one department may provide useful information for other departments.

Internal database usually can be accessed more quickly and cheaply than other information sources, but they also present some problems. Because it was collected for other purpose, it may be incomplete or in the wrong form for making marketing decisions. They ages quickly and keeping the database current requires a major effort.

The database information must be well integrated and readily accessible through user friendly interface so that managers can find it easily and use it effectively.

Marketing intelligence: Marketing intelligence is a systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information about competitors and development in the marketing environment.

Much intelligence can be collected from people inside the rival companies. For example, while talking with a Kodak copier salesperson, a Xerox technician learned that the sales person was being trained to service Xerox products. With this information, Xerox design a total satisfaction guarantee, which allow copier returns for any reason as long as Xerox did the servicing.

The company can also obtain intelligence information from suppliers, resellers, and and key consumers, or it can get good information by observing competitors. For example, one company regularly checks out competitors' parking lots, full lots might indicate plenty of work and prosperity.

Competitor may reveal intelligence information through their annual reports, business publication, trade-show exhibits, press release, advertisement and web site. For example, Allied signal's web site provides revenue, goals and reveal the company's production defect rate along with its plan to improve it.

Marketing Research: In addition to information about competitor and environmental happenings, marketers often need formal studies (marketing research) of specific situations. Marketing research is a systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization. Marketing research is very useful in a wide variety of situations. For example, marketing research can help marketers assess market potential and market share.

Some large companies have their own research department that work with marketing managers on marketing research project. This is how Kraft, Citigroup and many other corporate giants handle marketing research.

The marketing research project has four steps:

1. Defining the problem: Marketing managers and researchers must work closely together to define problems and agree on research objectives. Defining the problem and research objectives is often the hardest step in the marketing research. Careful problem definition would have avoided the cost and delay of doing advertising research. After the problem has been defined carefully, marketing managers and researchers must set the research objectives. A marketing research might have one of three types of objectives.
2. Exploratory research is to gather preliminary information that will help define the problem and suggest hypotheses.
3. Descriptive research is to describe things, such as the market potential for a product or demographics and attitudes of consumers who buy the product.
4. Causal research is to test hypotheses about cause and effect relationship.

The statement of the problem and research objectives guides the entire research process.

Developing marketing research plan: Once the research problems and objectives have been defined, researchers must determine the exact information needed, develop a plan for gathering it efficiently, and present the plan to management.

Research objective must be translated into specific information needs. For example, demographic, economic and lifestyle of product current users. Retailer reactions to the new packaging. Forecast of sales of new and current packages.

The research plan should be presented in a written proposal. A written proposal is especially important when the research project is large and complex or when an outside firm caries it out. To meet the manager's information need, the research plan can call for gathering secondary or primary data.

Secondary data consist of information that already exist somewhere, having been collected for another purpose. Research is usually start by gathering secondary data. Companies can buy secondary data reports from outside suppliers. Using commercial online database, marketing researchers can conduct their own searches of secondary data sources.

Secondary data can usually be obtained more quickly and cheaply than primary data. But unfortunately, secondary data can also present problems. The researcher must evaluate secondary data information carefully to make certain it is relevant, accurate, up to date and impartial.

1. Primary data: Consist of information collected for specific purpose at hand. Secondary data provide a good starting point for research and often help to define problems and research objectives. In most case however, the company must also collect primary data.
2. Implementing marketing research plan: The researcher next puts the marketing research plan into action. This involves collecting, processing and analyzing the information. Researchers must process and analyze the collected data to isolate important information and findings. They need to check data for accuracy and completeness and code it for analysis. The researchers the tabulate the result and compute averages and other statistical measures.
3. Interpreting and reporting the findings: The market researcher must now interpret the findings, draw conclusion and report them to management. However, interpretation should no be left only to the researchers. They are often expert in research design and statistics, but the marketing manager is the one who should take and carry out the decision.

Analyzing Marketing Information

Information gathered in internal database and through marketing intelligence and marketing research usually requires more analysis. Information analysis might also involve a collection of analytical model that will help marketers make better decision. Marketing scientists have developed numerous models to help marketing managers make better marketing mix decisions, design sales territories and sales call plans, select sites for retail outlets, develop optimal advertising mixes, and forecast sales.

Distributing and using Marketing Information

Marketing information has no value until it is used to make better marketing decisions. Thus, the marketing information system must make the information available to the managers and others who make marketing decisions or deal with customers on day to day basis. But marketing managers may also need non routine information for special situations and on the spot decisions. Many firms use a company intra net to facilitate this.

In addition, companies are increasingly allowing key costumers and value network members to access account and product information and other data on demand on extra nets. Thanks to modern technology, today's marketing managers can gain direct access to the information system at any time and from any location.