A European Outlook
Leon G. Schiffman; Leslie Lazar Kanuk and Håvard Hansen
Second edition
,Contents
Chapter 1: An introduction to the study of consumer behaviour...........................3
Chapter 2: Consumer research.............................................................................. 6
Chapter 3: Market segmentation...........................................................................9
Chapter 4: Consumer decision-making................................................................11
Chapter 7: Consumer perception.........................................................................15
Chapter 8: Consumer learning............................................................................. 18
Chapter 9: Consumer attitude formation and change..........................................22
Chapter 15: Consumer influence and the diffusion of innovations.......................24
, Chapter 1: An introduction to the study of consumer behaviour
- Consumer behaviour the behaviour that consumers display in searching for,
purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of products and services that they
expect will satisfy their needs
- Two kinds of consumer entities:
Personal customer buys goods and services for his or her own use, for
the use of the household, or as a gift for a friend
Organisational customer buys products, equipment and services in
order to run their organisations (companies and charities, government
agencies (local and national), and institutions (e.g. schools, hospitals and
prisons))
- Marketing concept a business orientation that evolved in the 1950s through
several alternative approaches towards doing business referred to, respectively,
as the production concept, the product concept and the selling concept:
Production concept assumes that consumers are mostly interested in
product availability at low prices
Product concept assumes that consumers will buy the product that
offers them the highest quality, the best performance and the most
features
Selling concept a marketer’s primary focus is selling the product(s) that
it has unilaterally decided to produce
- ‘Marketing myopia’ a focus on the product rather than on the consumer
needs it presumes to satisfy
- Whereas the selling concept focuses on the needs of the sellers and on existing
products, the marketing concept focuses on the needs of the buyer
- The selling concept focuses on profits through sales volume; the marketing
concept focuses on profits through customer satisfaction
- Consumer research describes the process and tools used to study consumer
behaviour
- Two theoretical perspectives that guide the development of consumer research
methodology:
Positivist approach tends to be objective and empirical, to seek causes
for behaviour, and to conduct research studies that can be generalised to
larger populations
Interpretivist approach tends to be qualitative and based on small
samples
- Market segmentation the process of dividing a market into subsets of
consumers with common needs or characteristics
- Market targeting selecting one or more of the segments identified for the
company to pursue