Consumer Behavior
| Author | Lauren Block, Patricia Williams |
| Pages | 141-146 |
Page 141
While in medical school, Laura Trice's one major complaint about living a vegan lifestyle and following an animal-product-free diet was the lack of "great tasting sweets." Rather than sublimating her craving for junk food, she came up with a cookie recipe that she found satisfied her sweet tooth. After graduation from medical school, Trice found a business partner who had been a self-trained vegetarian chef for over twenty years and together they started Laura's Wholesome Junk Food in 2001 (http://www.LaurasWholesomeJunkFood.com). The concept was to provide snacks that tasted as great as junk food—something most people, especially the two founders, secretly loved—that also used ingredients which were more wholesome than those used in regular products.
In July 2002 Laura's Wholesome Junk Food released their first line of energy bars priced and sized to compete with the energy bars then on the market. Their first orders were from two small stores, a vending machine company and a coffee chain. To provide samples to convince consumers that something with healthful ingredients could taste good, Laura's Wholesome Junk Foods handed out bite-sized samples packed in plastic resealable tubs, which they subsequently named and trademarked Bite-lettes. What happened next surprised both Trice and Howard Weinthal, director of product development. "Consumers loved the Bite-lettes and kept asking how they might buy them. So we stopped making bars after 4 months and shut down for 6 months to find a place that could make the Bite-lettes for us. We didn't know if it was going to work. We thought we might be out of business" (Trice, 2005).
Figuring out not only what they wanted, but who would buy it, why they would buy it, where they would buy it, and how often they would buy it, is the cornerstone of understanding consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is the study of people: how we buy, consume and dispose of products. There were approximately 295 million people in the United States alone in 2004. Each of us is a consumer of hundreds of products every day. As consumers, we can benefit from a better understanding of how we make our decisions so that we can make wiser ones. Marketers can benefit from an understanding of consumer behavior so that they can better predict what consumers want and how best to offer it to them. Trice and Weinthal listened to consumer requests, created a new portion-controlled concept, and scrapped the full-sized energy bar. In 2005 Laura's Wholesome Junk Food sold Bite-lettes to more than 180 stores nationwide.
There are two major forces that shape who we are and what we buy. Our personal motives, attitudes, and decision-making abilities guide our consumption behavior. At the same time, our families, cultural background, the ads we see on television, and the sites we visit on the Internet influence our thoughts and actions (see Figure 1).
Our consumption behavior is a function of who we are as individuals. Our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and patterns of behavior determine what we buy, when we buy it, and how we use it. Internal factors have a major impact on consumer behavior.
A marketer's job is to figure out what needs and wants the consumer has, and what motivates the consumer to purchase. Motivation is the drive that initiates all our consumption behaviors, and consumers have multiple motives, or goals. Some of these are overt, such as a physiological thirst that motivates a consumer to purchase a soft drink or the need to purchase a new suit for an interview. Other motives are more obscure, such as a student's need to plug in to an iPod or wear designer clothes to gain social approval.
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Figure 1
Model of consumer behavior
Most consumption activities are the result of several motives operating at the same time. Researchers specially trained in uncovering motives often use qualitative research techniques in which consumers are encouraged to reveal their thoughts (cognitions) and feelings (affect) through probing dialogue. Focus groups and in-depth interviews give consumers an opportunity to discuss products and express opinions about consumption activities. Trained moderators or interviewers are often able to tap into preconscious motives that might otherwise go undetected. Sentence completion tasks (e.g., Men who wear Old Spice are …) or variants of the thematic apperception tests, in which respondents are shown a picture and asked to tell a story surrounding it, are additional techniques that provide insight into underlying motives.
Consumer motives or goals can be represented by the values they hold. Values are people's broad life goals that symbolize a preferred mode of behaving (e.g., independent, compassionate, honest) or a preferred end-state of being (e.g., sense of accomplishment, love and affection, social recognition). Consumers buy products that will help them achieve desired values; they see product attributes as a means to an end. Understanding the means-end perspective can help marketers better position the product and create more effective advertising and promotion campaigns.
The consumer information-processing approach aids in understanding consumptive behavior by focusing on the sequence of mental activities that people use in...
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