Factors Affecting Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior refers to the selection, purchase and consumption of goods and services for the satisfaction of their wants. There are different processes involved in the consumer behavior. Initially the consumer tries to find what commodities he would like to consume, then he selects only those commodities that promise greater utility. After selecting the commodities, the consumer makes an estimate of the available money which he can spend. Lastly, the consumer analyzes the prevailing prices of commodities and takes the decision about the commodities he should consume. Meanwhile, there are various other factors influencing the purchases of consumer such as social, cultural, personal and psychological. The explanation of these factors is given below.

1. Cultural Factors

Consumer behavior is deeply influenced by cultural factors such as: buyer culture, subculture, and social class.

• Culture

Basically, culture is the part of every society and is the important cause of person wants and behavior. The influence of culture on buying behavior varies from country to country therefore marketers have to be very careful in analyzing the culture of different groups, regions or even countries.

• Subculture

Each culture contains different subcultures such as religions, nationalities, geographic regions, racial groups etc. Marketers can use these groups by segmenting the market into various small portions. For example marketers can design products according to the needs of a particular geographic group.

• Social Class

Every society possesses some form of social class which is important to the marketers because the buying behavior of people in a given social class is similar. In this way marketing activities could be tailored according to different social classes. Here we should note that social class is not only determined by income but there are various other factors as well such as: wealth, education, occupation etc.

2. Social Factors

Social factors also impact the buying behavior of consumers. The important social factors are: reference groups, family, role and status.

• Reference Groups

Reference groups have potential in forming a person attitude or behavior. The impact of reference groups varies across products and brands. For example if the product is visible such as dress, shoes, car etc then the influence of reference groups will be high. Reference groups also include opinion leader (a person who influences other because of his special skill, knowledge or other characteristics).

• Family

Buyer behavior is strongly influenced by the member of a family. Therefore marketers are trying to find the roles and influence of the husband, wife and children. If the buying decision of a particular product is influenced by wife then the marketers will try to target the women in their advertisement. Here we should note that buying roles change with change in consumer lifestyles.

• Roles and Status

Each person possesses different roles and status in the society depending upon the groups, clubs, family, organization etc. to which he belongs. For example a woman is working in an organization as finance manager. Now she is playing two roles, one of finance manager and other of mother. Therefore her buying decisions will be influenced by her role and status.

3. Personal Factors

Personal factors can also affect the consumer behavior. Some of the important personal factors that influence the buying behavior are: lifestyle, economic situation, occupation, age, personality and self concept.

• Age

Age and life-cycle have potential impact on the consumer buying behavior. It is obvious that the consumers change the purchase of goods and services with the passage of time. Family life-cycle consists of different stages such young singles, married couples, unmarried couples etc which help marketers to develop appropriate products for each stage.

• Occupation

The occupation of a person has significant impact on his buying behavior. For example a marketing manager of an organization will try to purchase business suits, whereas a low level worker in the same organization will purchase rugged work clothes.

• Economic Situation

Consumer economic situation has great influence on his buying behavior. If the income and savings of a customer is high then he will purchase more expensive products. On the other hand, a person with low income and savings will purchase inexpensive products.

• Lifestyle

Lifestyle of customers is another import factor affecting the consumer buying behavior. Lifestyle refers to the way a person lives in a society and is expressed by the things in his/her surroundings. It is determined by customer interests, opinions, activities etc and shapes his whole pattern of acting and interacting in the world.

• Personality

Personality changes from person to person, time to time and place to place. Therefore it can greatly influence the buying behavior of customers. Actually, Personality is not what one wears; rather it is the totality of behavior of a man in different circumstances. It has different characteristics such as: dominance, aggressiveness, self-confidence etc which can be useful to determine the consumer behavior for particular product or service.

4. Psychological Factors

There are four important psychological factors affecting the consumer buying behavior. These are: perception, motivation, learning, beliefs and attitudes.

• Motivation

The level of motivation also affects the buying behavior of customers. Every person has different needs such as physiological needs, biological needs, social needs etc. The nature of the needs is that, some of them are most pressing while others are least pressing. Therefore a need becomes a motive when it is more pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.

• Perception

Selecting, organizing and interpreting information in a way to produce a meaningful experience of the world is called perception. There are three different perceptual processes which are selective attention, selective distortion and selective retention. In case of selective attention, marketers try to attract the customer attention. Whereas, in case of selective distortion, customers try to interpret the information in a way that will support what the customers already believe. Similarly, in case of selective retention, marketers try to retain information that supports their beliefs.

• Beliefs and Attitudes

Customer possesses specific belief and attitude towards various products. Since such beliefs and attitudes make up brand image and affect consumer buying behavior therefore marketers are interested in them. Marketers can change the beliefs and attitudes of customers by launching special campaigns in this regard.

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How to Market Yourself Effectively

It doesn't matter whether you run your own business, are an employee or job seeker, if you market yourself well, you will achieve success. Marketing is about finding your unique abilities and being able to communicate these to others effectively.

You may have heard of the saying "people buy people", so take the opportunity to let people know why they should promote you, employ you or buy from you. Here are my tips to market yourself effectively:

1. Write down a list of your strengths and skills and use these as selling points when you meet new people. What is unique about you? What sets you apart from anyone else? How can you make sure you market yourself at every opportunity?

2. Develop a succinct message that you can share with others that takes about 10-20 seconds to deliver. In business, this is known as an elevator speech - who you are and what you can do for others. Design and practice your message.

3. Remember that every time you communicate, this is the opportunity to make an impact. Make sure that anything you put in writing, such as a letter or CV is clear, concise and easy to read. And remember to include the strengths you have identified above.

4. You also communicate by what you wear and whether it is appropriate for the occasion. You may wish to research the dress code and give yourself plenty of time to decide what to wear. Choose your outfit wisely with the appropriate accessories, and remember to clean your shoes!

5. Make a great first impression. People tend to make a first impression of you within the first few minutes of meeting you. When you meet new people, use appropriate eye contact, a firm handshake, and smile!

6. Preparation is key. Whether you are going to a networking event or a job interview, it is important to prepare in advance. Plan the journey before you leave, know who you are going to meet and plan what you are going to say.

What do you do to market yourself effectively? Let me know - email me today!

Copyright Karen Williams 2008. All Rights Reserved

Karen Williams is a Personal Development Coach and runs her own coaching practice, Self Discovery Coaching. She has over ten years experience of working in Human Resources, training, coaching and management roles and is a Chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

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How to Write a Marketing Research Paper

Well if you are going to write a thesis on sales an marketing, then here is what you should not do to get it right!

1. Proof read your papers well-you may have written the best paper in the world but no one will be able to get you thoughts and your ideas if your paper is filled with typos and errors. After you have written the paper do take a few minutes to check through what you have written t o make sure that there are no typos and grammatical errors.

2. After writing your thesis presentation, take a look at the overall format of your paper. Most professors provide a detailed summary of how they want the title page, introduction page and overall presentation of the paper. You should follow this to the tee to prevent any silly errors and mistakes. If you do not follow set formats your papers will be rejected resulting in later problems.

3. Most professors also assign projects to be completed along with the term papers. You should be able to collect data from your sales projects to co-relate with your data. Please do brush up your analysis methods of how to collate data and understand it to produce better results on your research methods.

4. While checking your papers please do not relay on your spell checker as it does not do the corrections of simple grammatical mistakes. It cannot correct from - and form and you lost out because of these errors. The best idea is to sleep on it and wait till the next day to take a fresh look at what you have written.

5. Please do give credit where it's due. If you have taken research and used it for references then use the proper citation style to tell your readers where you took your references from. Use an annotated bibliography and citation styles as your professor has asked you to do.

6. Anecdotal information is not considered for research purposes. If you have interviews, actual quotes and laboratory data to back up anecdotal information then that is ok but other that that please do not use gossip and rants by cults and hate groups as the basis for your term paper.

7. Do not use superlatives like good, felt and think etc. These words are not supposed to be used as they do not tell the reader the actual facts but are supposed to be feelings that you could feel with emotions and technical writing for research papers does not need feelings.

8. Wrong words like mistakes between affect and effect or misspelling of important appliances like a spectrophotometer or oscilloscope are not to be done. If you don't know the spellings please do Google them immediately to find out what they mean and the spellings. Mistakes with technical terms just demonstrate that you do not know your subject well at all.

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White Paper Writing: Sustainable

Do you know what a white paper is? If you don't know then we need to start here. It is a paper that is very similar to an essay, an essay that is written to persuade whoever is reading it to go with a particular ideal or product. Why are they called that? They are called this because in the 1920's in Great Britain they were given this name because there were blue policy books and white policy books. We are talking about politics here, Winston Churchill was one of the most famous well known figures who wrote a white paper.

In this day and age they are still very much used in politics but you will find that they have moved on to a different type of style now. For example you will find them used very much in such fields as computers and software. A software company might just employ a writer to write one regarding a new piece of software that is due to arrive on the market. The whole point of the paper is to convince whoever they are selling it to, to buy into it. They would normally be selling it to a large corporation rather than to an individual buyer. They are written in a very concise manner, therefore; they have to be written by someone who knows what they are doing. Who knows how to write in this kind of style.

How long are they?

They are about six pages minimum. Sometimes you will find that they can be as long as one hundred pages. It really does just depend on what they are about.

How much do writers get paid?

The fee for writers can differ, because you can work for yourself as a freelancer. Or, you can work as a staff member. You will get paid a salary in which case, your salary could range from $50,000 and upwards. It all does depend, if you were a freelancer your fee would be $5,000 or more. Some really experienced writers are actually paid more than this.

So, if you want to get a higher fee you would have to gather a few good years of experience first. So in terms of sustainabliity, if you don't have the drive to carry out work that could take two weeks or more to complete you won't be able to do a job like this. White paper writing is the kind of job that could make you easily get burnout. Not to say that you would get burnout, but the sheer volume of content that has to be produced in order to make a very good living for yourself would mean that you are constantly writing. It is a very respecatable way of writing for a living though.

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Embrace the Spirit of Opulence in Marketing Your Business

In the movie and book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, Bob Proctor mentions and praises the essay "The Spirit of Opulence" by Thomas Troward. Troward's essay defines that to think opulently is to think largely, generously, and liberally. Have a look at the other essays on this site and you will be amazed at the content.

Applying the spirit of opulence to our life cannot but help us to succeed and grow. It is not a matter of collecting things so that we can live in the style of the rich and famous. It is a way of living, including doing business, that will attract opulence. In other words, what we have in our lives is the result of the actions that we take. Living in the spirit of opulence will allow us to think of abundance rather than lack and when we feel abundant, then we feel generous. If we are generous with our knowledge, time, money and other resources, then we will reap the rewards of this.

In business this means that we want to think of what we can add to the transaction, not what we can take from it. Rather than focusing on making money, we want to focus on how our product or service can benefit others. The question should be: How can we add more value, in our customer's eyes? Only then will we truly be able to find success in our business transactions. Again, if we focus on the money we will get, then the message we are giving out is not congruent with a feeling of abundance from which we will receive abundance. It must instead be too mindful of a lack of money, which will only manifest more of that lack of money. It is important to our success that whatever our businesses offer, that the customer perceives more value in that than what they have to part with (money) to get it. we must take the time to learn what our target market wants and then make the effort to market that to them. Once a sale is made, we should follow-up to ensure that our customer is happy with the purchase and absolutely rectify any problems. A satisfied customer will be a repeat customer, supplying free word of mouth advertising. An unhappy customer can do significant damage to a business' reputation and its potential to maintain or increase sales.

This information is not new to many of us. So many of the business and self-help books tell us all of this information. What begins to become amazing is that this information has been communicated to us in different ways from different people pretty much since the beginning of time. Bob Proctor refers to a Judge Thomas Troward's work in the early 1900s, about the same time that Wallace Wattles was writing his book "The Science of Getting Rich". The Science of Getting Rich is the book that Rhonda Byrne's daughter gave to her resulting in "The Secret" movie, book, website and so on. As legend has it, The Emerald Tablets referred to in The Secret do come from the beginning of time. So we would do well to take heed of all this advice. We are being told this for a reason, and no negative consequence will result. The outcome is amazing to all that practice it on a daily basis.

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The Basics Of Internet Marketing For Your Internet Home Business

If you are just starting out with your foray into e-commerce, you have undoubtedly researched the basics of internet marketing via web searches and print, and much of it is probably outdated. It used to be that the only way to get your traffic up was to either constantly change the code on your website and load it up with keywords, or pay someone hundreds of dollars a month to do it for you.

Things have changed, and what is happening seems to be the wheat separating from the chaff, there is a new method of search engine optimization, and it doesn't lend itself well to offshore outsourcing. Article marketing has become the way to gain organic first page placement. This is good news for internet home business proprietors and bad news for the people who have thrown lots of money to SEO companies here and abroad. Article marketing needs two talents for it to work- knowledge about what you are selling and the ability to compose an interesting, informative and grammatically correct essay.

Of course, if you posses these talents already, your work from home business will receive plenty of web traffic if you publish enough articles. If you don't have a flair for writing, you can either hire an author or pay for your listings. Paying for listings is expensive, and unless you have a huge amount of capital that strategy is not one of the basics of internet marketing anymore.

The basics of internet marketing have changed, article marketing is one of the best strategy's for your internet home business, but don't stop there, blogging and social networking sites are literally food for the Google spiders. Facebook has become essential for just about every business and organization, if you aren't on it you are doing your work from home business a real disservice. Even if you aren't a social butterfly in real life most people find it easy to do from behind a Facebook account.

It would also be in your best interest to become a social butterfly, the basics of internet marketing are merging with the basics of standard marketing. To truly realize the potential of your internet home business there is some legwork required. Have some business cards printed up with the URL of your work at home business website and hand them out liberally. You can even have promotional products like pens, mouse pads and stress toys. Decorate your promotional items with your URL, Facebook and twitter addresses. The more contacts you make, the better chances you have for those contacts to link to your page(s).

To sum it up, work from home can be profitable. but only if you keep up to date on your marketing strategies.

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7 Things to Consider Before Starting a Network Marketing Business

Why bother getting involved in network marketing?

Well, a good, honest network marketing business can easily double or triple the average income. However, if you fall into one of the common mistakes of new, error-prone network marketing business owners and entrepreneurs, you will cripple your chances of success.

Here are a few points to think about as you seek the right home business or network marketing opportunity.

1. Is the network marketing company a good fit for you? While the ability to make a good income is important, one of the first things you should look at is how YOU feel about the company and its products. If you have questions or just don't understand the product or service, ask. It's fine if you need clarification. However, if you just don't see the need, feel that the customer is going to be scammed or just can't get a handle on the product or service yourself then you will probably have a hard time promoting the company or its product line enthusiastically. I can promote Amsoil synthetic motor oil comfortably because I have worked on cars all my life, understand the workings of lubricants, understand and recognize the benefits of synthetic lubricants, and have a keen interest in America's moving away from its dependence on foreign oil. I would be hard pressed to stick my obviously masculine and heavily bearded face in some lady's way and try to persuade her on the virtues of some Avon lipstick.

2. What does the commission schedule look like? Don't just listen to the recruiter's claims. Sit down and look at the figures and run a few conservative estimates. Be aware that despite all network marketing success stories and claims by the company, the profit expectations you hear or see are probably based on what someone will do after they have been with the organization for a while. There's a learning curve to every thing. At first, your expectations of making a lot of money may be very small. As Tom "Big Al" Schreiter asked in one of his books, "They train burger flippers, don't they?"

NOTE: On the reverse side of this, the first two network marketers I ever knew personally did not begin making a significant income until they had each been in their respective businesses for about three years. During that time, they both came close to quitting because of the small returns they were experiencing. Somewhere in the period between years three and five, they each reached a point in which they were making more than $100,000.00 a month.

My first successful year in network marketing came after four years of complete failure due to my habit of picking businesses because they looked like I could make a lot of money and/or quit before I had a chance to get my business off the ground. In that first successful year, I only made a few hundred dollars. Three years later, I was making a few thousand dollars a year and a year after that, I quit my job and now do network marketing full time; making 2.5 times as much as the highest salary I had ever received at a job.

3. Take a look at who is recruiting you and how they do it. Is it Slick Willie who is trying to talk you into joining his network marketing opportunity, your level-headed sister, or your fly-by-night brother-in-law (my brother-in-law flies by night, but he's a pilot). Are they emoting about all the great money you "will" make, or are they explaining the possibility of building an independent business? On the flip side, the person you are talking to is not necessarily the best representative the company has. I recently encountered a situation in which an extremely honest and reputable network marketing company got slapped with a lawsuit as a result of outrageous recruiting claims by one of their reps. The claims that were being used to build a fantastic downline for this individual went completely against company policy and made the company look like it was just a pyramid scheme.

NOTE: Don't turn down someone's offer just because THEY haven't made any money at it yet. As soon as you sign up, you will be in their shoes. Almost everybody above you was in the same position at one time. However, if they can show you that they are making money from product sales; this is a good sign, even if the money is still small. A reputable company should have no problem with you talking to the people in the recruiter's upline. I signed up for a company several years ago under a very nice man who was hardly making any money at the time. The man who recruited him, however, was making a very good income and was working very hard to help his sales team produce the sort of results he was experiencing.

4. How were you recruited? Most network marketing occurs through...well...networking. This doesn't mean that ads are never used, but if you answer an ad in a magazine, unless the company is well known, you might have no way of really knowing anything about the company.

In the age of computers, you can often do a few searches at Google or elsewhere and find out what success others are having with the company and how they are being treated. Also,

5. Are you going to be forced to buy product? Although this is not necessarily the kiss of death, a few years ago, many major companies required their people to buy large quantities of product monthly. The reason claimed was that the people were buying at wholesale and could sell the product and get more money back than they had put in. Since most people are lousy at sales, many people wound up with a garage or shed full of unused product.

On the other hand, there are perfectly legitimate network marketing companies that do expect a minimum amount of activity for the distributor to receive commissions on sales by their downlines. Some companies might offer bonuses if you exceed a certain minimum sales level. Some companies make a regular shipment of product or membership in services a part of the monthly or annual fee.

6. How much time can you commit to your new business? Although almost everyone's goal in network marketing is to achieve enough income to quit working for someone else, many people just want to supplement the income they get from a job, retirement, or some other source. Believe it or not, many preachers for smaller churches become network marketers because they need the additional income and it fits into their lifestyle and personal abilities...plus, they have a built in network. Even they, however, have limited time to commit to their enterprise, and, over time, success in most network marketing businesses is going to be in direct proportion to amount of time spent working on the business, contacts made, presentations given, and materials placed in peoples' hands.

7. Do you have what it takes? There are a couple of points to consider here, your personal work ethic, and the skills necessary to be successful in network marketing.

One of the most common recruiting claims of a network marketing business is that you can "be your own boss". That's great if you can be a good employee as well. As the boss, you will be able to make the plans and decisions, but as the employee you will have to show up for work and be ready to pitch in with waiting for someone to come along and tell you what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

As far as skills are concerned, I have some good news. Most of us, and this probably includes you, hate to "sell" things to people. In network marketing, if you have picked a good business, the main thing you will have to sell is yourself. That's where the networking comes in. Build a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, let them know what you do, do your part well, and the business will grow.

By all means, take your time before leaping feet first into a network marketing business opportunity, but once you have made the decision to start then don't wait. The sooner you begin your new business, the sooner you can be on your way to achieving your dreams and goals.

Donovan Baldwin is a freelance writer currently living in Stone Mountain, GA. A University Of West Florida alumnus (1973) with a BA in accounting, he is a member of Mensa and has held several managerial positions. After retiring from the U. S. Army in 1995, he became interested in Internet marketing and developed various online businesses. He has been writing poetry, articles, and essays for over 40 years, and now frequently publishes articles on his own websites and for use by other webmasters.

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