Marketing, Consumer Behavior and Decision-Making

Introduction

In today’s global market, the opinion that marketers should implement new business strategies based on building new levels of relationships with their customers appear to be very important. There exist numerous opinions on how the strategy of addressing consumers is changing in modern conditions. These strategies include addressing every particular customer personally and creating customer communities. Generally, the main finding of recent research is the importance of applying a new strategy in the interaction with customers. Evaluating the situation it appears that marketing specialists will succeed in the development of their companies’ business much more than ever before by means of building a relationship with their consumers and creating communities of their customers.

Main body

First, speaking about the new strategies in communicating with customers is necessary to understand what consumer behavior is and what its main components are. According to Seifoullaeva, consumer behavior is ” the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences or ideas to satisfy needs, and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society” (2004, p. 43). Consumers always want to find products that they would like to consume. It is absolutely evident that the customer is a very important component of the whole system of marketing management as customers are those who buy and evaluate products and services produced by an organization. Marketers are to focus on their marketing strategies to come up with successful marketing campaigns. In modern market conditions, new models of driving buyers’ actions are applied. These models focus on building relationships with customers and creating customer communities which help marketers be more effective in achieving the results they want. These communities would improve the success of marketers because they will create an advantageous climate of mutual trust between consumers and marketers.

Marketers should know and understand why people behave in a particular manner. If they do not understand this, it makes it hard to achieve a sustainable behavior change. Trying to inform the customer concerning the benefits of certain behaviors the marketer will be able to affect his or her choice. Social marketing is a way of developing a community of like-minded consumers. Social marketing is much more than mere promotion. This is the whole science combining a number of other sciences in itself. Social marketing includes such sciences as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics. Social marketing aims to understand the motivation behind consumer acts. Acquiring the information concerning customer behavior, it is possible to develop new products, services, and advertising strategies meeting the current requirements of the market.

Conversely, there exist opinions that personal approach and the efforts by the marketers in establishing personal relationships with their customers seem to be intrusive and disturbing for customers. The proponents of such ideas support their position by stating that some consumers admit that the efforts of marketers to encourage him o them to join particular consumer communities seem to be interference into his or her personal affairs and robbing him or her out of their personal space. Still, this supposition is many times denied by the facts and evidence that were found during a row of researches in the area. In particular, the majority of customers confess that they benefit greatly when they are a part of the consumer community as they are offered what they need from the very beginning there and, thus, do not have to spend much time making his or her choices (Lantos, 2011). This happens as consumer communities are organized on the basis of taking the preferences of particular social groups into consideration.

Finally, the impact of consumer satisfaction on marketing is more than significant. For this reason, marketers are to work hard to help customers be satisfied by the received service. Marketers may apply the most diversified strategies for this including store promotion, advertising, exposure, branding, and so on. The low involvement of the consumers in products purchase tends not to recognize their need until the time they are in the store and therefore the marketers tend to provide the store promotion. Another way of changing the behavior of a consumer is exposure. A consumer may hear an advertisement of a certain product on TV, see it on a billboard, read about it on social networks, and because of the exposure he or she may decide to buy the product, and this is that exposure is a powerful element. Branding is a strategy used by marketers for differentiating their products from other similar ones. A product with a unique name, image, and appearance will attract shoppers, and they will be crowded in the market.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the examination of different sources on changing customer behavior reveals the importance of implementing new strategies in establishing a new level of relationship with customers. Marketers should create different approaches enabling them to prove to any particular person the benefits he or she will get from the service or product offered by the marketers.

References

Lantos, P. (2011). Consumer Behavior in Action: Real Life Application for Marketing Managers. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.

Seifoullaeva, E. (2004). Consumer Behavior in Global Marketing. International Conference on Softcomputing Applied in Computer and Economic Environment, 42-59.

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