Consumers heavily affect the market today. Most of them may not even be aware of the choices they make. Yet, in the wake of recent changes in consumer behaviour, understanding how consumers behave is more important than ever.
The digital age has changed the way we shop and what we buy. For example, there are now countless ways to keep up with fashion trends without having to leave your home or spend a lot of money.
In order to successfully reach your market, you need to focus on knowing how consumers behave - consumer insights, customer retention, and customer satisfaction.
We’ve put together a short guide that will pull back the curtain to understand consumer behaviour and use it as a reminder in creating successful marketing campaigns.
Consumer behaviour is the study of learning about the customer journey and catering to their wants and needs. As a result, you will identify opportunities for improvement, replacements, or omissions in your product that will make it the best on the market!
But a good first step to understand consumer behaviour is to learn the role of marketing and discover your relationship with consumers.
Let's say you're planning to create a new phone model. You have all these ideas and concepts brainstormed and gathered by your team. The resources, equipment, and expenses are already complete. The only question now is, 'Would you immediately try to manufacture the phone and sell it to the market?'
If you said 'yes,' then you might need to think twice. But if you answered 'no,' then why?
Businesses like Etsy and Amazon take a different approach by providing the products, leaving the work of selling up to the customer. Meaning, customers are responsible for all their purchasing activities and the reason behind such expenses.
While marketing aims to move a product or service through a set of channels, consumer behaviour works as a decentralized, bottom-up process.
Learning about your target audience, their preferences, the type of goods they acquire, how they use them, and how they dispose of these goods are few aspects of proper market research that will help you build a successful marketing journey.
When a business creates new products, it's essential to pay attention to this information and data to avoid wasting time on something that won't sell. Many components determine what type of content will captivate your audience and get them to take an interest, mainly the three things we're going to talk about next.
Established brands and large companies use various tools to understand how consumers think and assess their wants and needs based on their behaviour.
Consumer reports, surveys, interviews, and data are just some methods they turn to understand how consumers make buying decisions.
From there, they discovered that the decision-making of a consumer is influenced by three main factors, namely: Psychological Factors, Personal Factors, and Social Factors. How do they differ?
The way we think and the way we behave have something to do with psychology. This is because everything that comes in contact with our senses affects us, from what kind of food you eat or where it's grown to how much time you spend on social media every day.
This factor can affect the perception and attitude towards products, either motivating or discouraging customers from purchasing.
For example, when you're on the hunt for a new smartphone, it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the options and features. But you're convinced that you need a good camera feature with large storage space so that downloading more useful apps would be possible to make life easier while working from home (or taking some courses).
In the end, your perception towards a particular thing moved you to purchase the phone with the specifications your psyche thinks can bring more value.
Psychological factors are not only driven by perception but also motivation, learning, beliefs, and regrets. In order for you to understand these factors and how they influence consumer behaviour, it is important to understand how people perceive brands, products, and services.
How we use and dispose of goods may be different depending on our personal factors.
The demographic profile, such as age, gender, profession, culture, and background, affects the way the group of consumers uses and dispose of goods. This means preferences from one consumer are different from another.
For instance, earlier generations may choose a simpler yet accessible phone, while millennials or generation Z would probably differ. They might want something modern that comes from a well-known brand.
In another case, maybe a specific brand is personally drawn to your consumer, or the corporation supports the same moral or religious beliefs. For whatever reason, motivated by personal interests and opinions, it plays a significant role in purchasing power.
The so-called social or external factors have something to do with "influence." It may come from your environment, the people around you, and their qualities.
These factors have a convincing power to motivate you to purchase a particular item or service.
Given our example for the phone, if your peers keep bragging about the newly-released phone with three back cameras, a great audio system, and large memory space. This might persuade you to buy the same thing.
Why? Because someone close to you already bought the phone, so you might think that there's no risk in buying. But if you came across television commercials or social media advertisements, you might tend to ignore the product.
Generally, these internal and external motivators - psychological, personality, and social factors influence how people perceive the items they want to acquire or get rid of. But trying to understand consumers will help you use these insights to your advantage. But, how?
Think about how many times we keep on making decisions in a day. "What clothes should I wear? What should I eat for breakfast? How should I plan the day to be more productive and efficient?"
The decision-making process of a consumer is influenced by the things they should use (the buying motivator) and activities they should do (the service generator).
Likewise, marketers use gathered insights from consumers to make decisions about how they can flourish their company.
Going back to the example we've mentioned throughout this article, if you have enough behavioural data from consumers, you can base it on the way you produce or manufacture your product or service.
You can discover the answers to specific questions like, "What types of phones to design, the price the consumers are willing to pay, and where should they sell it?".
On the other hand, loyal customers would likely buy more items from you since you cater to almost everything they need in a phone. It has the features they like, the prices are justifiable, and the location has a great ambience.
But studying consumer behaviour is not for phone products alone. It could be anything that people want to purchase or acquire, both tangible and intangible in a few cases.
Moreover, it should not focus on one group of people from a single place or share the same social status. Insights from your target audience were gathered through marketing campaigns and research, survey results, sales platforms, and search engines.
Major corporations and companies spend millions and even billions of British Pounds just to study the customers and their behaviours towards specific products and services.
You might not be as influential or as wealthy as you are. However, it's still necessary to keep in mind the importance of consumer behaviour for your company, giving you a profitable marketing experience in the future.
If you feel like you don't have enough time to spend learning about consumer behaviour or how to effectively gain insights from consumers or customers, we're here to help!
Our team at Appointment Setting UK will help you connect with other companies with expertise in consumer research, which can help your business manufacture products or offer services your target market is most interested in.
Call us today at 020-80599450 and receive a free quote from our market research partners!
