Consumer Behavior
120 flashcards by MentisLibrary
How buyers actually decide: the five-stage decision process, perception and attention, motivation and self-concept, learning and memory, attitudes and persuasion, social influence, behavioral economics, and what happens after the purchase.
- What does the field of consumer behavior study?
- How people select, buy, use and dispose of offerings, and the mental and social processes behind each of those acts.
- What are the five stages of the consumer decision process?
- Need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, post-purchase evaluation.
- What triggers need recognition?
- A gap between the actual state and the desired state that is large enough to motivate action.
- What is the difference between internal and external search?
- Internal search retrieves what memory already holds; external search gathers new information from reviews, retailers, ads and other people.
- What is an evoked set?
- The small group of brands a buyer actually considers, drawn from those they are aware of.
- How does an awareness set narrow into evoked, inert and inept sets?
- Evoked brands are considered, inert brands are known but treated with indifference, inept brands are actively rejected.
- What are evaluative criteria?
- The attributes a buyer uses to compare options, such as price, battery life, warranty or delivery speed.
- What makes an attribute a determinant attribute?
- It is both important to the buyer and different across the options considered, so it actually decides the choice.
- What is a compensatory decision rule?
- A rule in which a strong score on one attribute can offset a weak score on another, so options are scored overall.
- What is a noncompensatory decision rule?
- A rule in which a failure on one attribute cannot be offset, so options below a cutoff are eliminated outright.
- What is the lexicographic decision rule?
- Rank attributes by importance and choose the option that wins on the most important one, breaking ties on the next attribute.
- What is the conjunctive decision rule?
- Set a minimum acceptable level on every attribute and eliminate any option that falls short on any of them.
- What is elimination by aspects?
- Rank attributes, eliminate every option failing a cutoff on the top attribute, then repeat down the ranking until one option remains.
- What is extended problem solving?
- High-involvement decision making with wide search and careful evaluation, used for unfamiliar, expensive or risky purchases.
- What is routine response behavior?
- Low-involvement repeat purchasing made largely from memory, with almost no search or evaluation.
- What is involvement in consumer behavior?
- The personal relevance of a product or decision, driven by perceived risk, cost, visibility and how much the category matters to the buyer.
- Name the main types of perceived risk in a purchase.
- Functional, financial, physical, social, psychological and time risk.
- What is an unplanned purchase versus an impulse purchase?
- An unplanned purchase is any item not decided on before the trip; an impulse purchase adds a sudden, affect-driven urge to buy now.
- What are the three stages of perception?
- Exposure, attention and interpretation.
- What is selective exposure?
- People position themselves near some stimuli and away from others, skipping ads, scrolling past and installing blockers.
- What is selective attention?
- Limited attentional capacity is allocated to stimuli that are relevant, novel, intense or personally meaningful, and the rest is filtered out.
- What is the just noticeable difference?
- The smallest change in a stimulus a person can reliably detect, also called the differential threshold.
- What does Weber's law say about noticing change?
- The just noticeable difference is a roughly constant proportion of the original stimulus, so larger starting values need larger changes to be noticed.
- How do marketers apply the just noticeable difference deliberately?
- Keep unwanted changes below it and push wanted changes above it.
- Is subliminal advertising an effective way to drive purchase?
- No reliable evidence supports it as a purchase driver; the idea persists largely because of publicity around an early claim that was later admitted to be fabricated.
- What is the figure-ground principle in perception?
- One element is perceived as the focal figure and the rest recedes as background.
- What is sensory marketing?
- Deliberately designing sight, sound, smell, touch and taste cues to shape perception, mood and behavior.
- What is a perceptual map?
- A picture of how buyers see competing brands on two or more attributes, used to locate gaps and check positioning.
- What is the price-quality inference?
- When quality is hard to judge directly, buyers treat a higher price as a signal of it.
- What is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic product cues?
- Intrinsic cues belong to the product itself, such as taste, materials or performance; extrinsic cues sit outside it, such as price, brand, packaging and country of origin.