CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

Consumer Behaviour



Consumer Behaviour

Introduction

The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the "consumer attention space," or banners. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, the task is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Shops make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of "consumer attention space" for the arriving consumer is sold. Each shop is represented by a software agent that bids for each consumer.(Crask,1995) This allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy to focus on consumers interested in their offerings.

Major characteristics of consumers and markets

Consumer research is difficult for at least four reasons: first, in sensory research the goal is to understand how individuals process and respond to exposure to sensory information, whereas, in consumer research, the goal is to predict consumer purchase decisions; second, in consumer research, individual differences between consumers are significant; third, consumers think and behave in a dynamic, complex and intrusive competitor environment; and, fourth, individual promotional elements such as food color strongly interact with all other aspects of the marketer's promotional plan to influence the consumer.(DuBose,2000) The imposition of experimental controls to solve this problem is difficult due to the highly interactive nature of all of these complex elements, making it difficult to remove the consumer to a highly controlled laboratory setting, and not have the consumer behave differently than she or he would when routinely shopping on their own.Concerning the gaffes that Coke made with respect to New Coke,

“The Coca-Cola Company has one of the largest, best-managed and most advanced marketing research operations in America. Good marketing research has kept the company atop the rough-and-tumble soft-drink market for decades. But marketing research is far from an exact science. Consumers are full of surprises and figuring them out can be awfully tough. If Coca-Cola can make a large marketing research mistake, any company can.”(Crask,1995)

Price information, like any other information consumers are exposed to, will affect their behaviour only to the extent it passes the filter of selective attention, which screens out most of the information in the environment. Whether consumers pay attention to price information will partly depend on characteristics of the price stimuli, partly on the subjective relevance of price information at the time of exposure (Grunert, 1996). Determinants of the subjective relevance of price information have been object of a good deal of research, and the construct price involvement has been used to designate consumers' motivation to pay attention to price information (Crask,1995).

Price involvement, in turn, has been related to a host of factors, including perceived budget constraints, 'lowest price' or 'value for money' as basic purchasing motives, or 'price mavenism,' i.e., a desire to appear as a market expert when talking to ...