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Consumer buying behavior and market segmentation

by The Maniac

Created on: February 06, 2007   Last Updated: April 13, 2007

Every day we all are making different decision and behaving differently on different situations. Consumer buying behavior is the output of how individual or household consumers behave or the decision making on buying any goods or services. Consumer buying behavior is an important part of marketing, which studies the reasons of why, when, where, what and how the consumers are behaving on their buying decisions. Consumer buyer behavior depends on different types of marketing (Products, Place, Price, Promotions) and other stimuli (Economic, Technological, Political and Cultural) these factors influence the consumer black box to produce responses for making decision about selecting products, brands choice, price etc.


Cultural, social, personal and psychological these four factors have great influence on consumer buyer behavior. Human wants, perceptions, values, behavior learned from society, family other institutions. Social factor consists of a person's reference group family, friend's organizations. Personal factor is included age of lifecycle, economic situation, profession, personality and other personal characteristics influence buyer decision process. Different psychological factors like motivation, perception, attitude, belief have influence on consumer buying decision.
Market segmentation is dividing the entire market into some specific partitions according to different factors and attributes of the target market as well as the product or services you will be offering to the market. Consumer market segmentation is influenced by different variables.
Generally different variables are used to segmenting the consumer market. Consumer market segmentation variables are geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral segmentation. Geographic segmentation is done based on regions, cities, states or other geographic factors. In demographic segmentation age, gender, family life cycle, education, occupation. Personality, lifestyle other psychographic factors are the points of psychographic segmentation and behavioral segmentation are based on benefits, usage rate, knowledge, attitude, to a product or service. Segmenting the market is not an easy job the people working on it, they have to consider different factors from many aspects. So segmenting market dependent on one variable is not wise idea. Marketing people use combination of different variables like geographic, psychographic, demographic and behavioral to make the segmentation precise.
Consumer buying behavior is influenced by for factors cultural, social, personal and psychological, these factors are consists of different points like perceptions, values, reference groups, occupations, life style, belief, attitude etc. In case of market segmentation the same points are repeated like gender, family life cycle, occupation, perception, income, life style etc in four variables use to segmenting the market for a product or services. In studying consumer behavior to a particular product or service and segmenting the market for the product or service some similar points are studied like age, occupation, life styles, education, and perception in different part of the process of study. In market segmentation the consumer buying behavior has relevance as segmentation of market is more or less dependent on buying behavior.

Kotler and Armstrong. Principles of Marketing 10th Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2004

Etzel, Walker and Stanton. Marketing 11th Edition.USA: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997

Bovee, Thill and Dovel. Advertising Excellence. USA: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1995

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