BUYER BEHAVIOUR

Role of Internal & External Variables in Influencing Buyer Behaviour

Role of Internal & External Variables in Influencing Buyer Behaviour

Introduction

Possibly the most challenging concept in marketing deals with understanding why buyers do what they do (or don't do). But such knowledge is critical for marketers since having a strong understanding of buyer behaviour will help shed light on what is important to the customer and also suggest the important influences on customer decision-making. Using this information, marketers can create marketing programs that they believe will be of interest to customers(Simonson, Carmon, Dhar, Drolet, Nowlis, 2001, pp.249-75). This paper evaluates the role of internal and external variables in influencing buyer behavior.

Discussion

Factors affecting how customers make decisions are extremely complex. Buyer behaviour is deeply rooted in psychology with dashes of sociology thrown in just to make things more interesting. Since every person in the world is different, it is impossible to have simple rules that explain how buying decisions are made. But those who have spent many years analyzing customer activity have presented us with useful “guidelines” in how someone decides whether or not to make a purchase.

Internal Influences

The following are factors that has influences on consumer purchase decisions:

Perceptual Filter

Perception is how consumers see ourselves and the world they live in. However, what ends up being stored inside us doesn't always get there in a direct manner. Often the mental makeup results from information that has been consciously or unconsciously filtered as consumers experience it, a process they refer to as a perceptual filter. To them this is their reality, though it does not mean it is an accurate reflection on what is real. Thus, perception is the way they filter stimuli (e.g., someone talking to us, reading a newspaper story) and then make sense out of it.

Perception has several steps(Solomon, 2002, pp.34-39).

• Exposure - sensing a stimuli (e.g. seeing an ad)

• Attention - an effort to recognize the nature of a stimuli (e.g. recognizing it is an ad)

• Awareness - assigning meaning to a stimuli (e.g., humorous ad for particular product)

• Retention - adding the meaning to one's internal makeup (i.e., product has fun ads)

How these steps are eventually carried out depends on a person's approach to learning. By learning it is meant that how someone changes what they know, which in turn may affect how they act. There are many theories of learning, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this tutorial, however, suffice to say that people are likely to learn in different ways. For instance, one person may be able to focus very strongly on a certain advertisement and be able to retain the information after being exposed only one time while another person may need to be exposed to the same advertisement many times before he/she even recognizes what it is. Consumers are also more likely to retain information if a person has a strong interest in the ...