Truth to be told, I was intended to learn consumer behavior because I wanna know how marketers manipulate consumers so that I’m aware of what they’re doing and keep away from consumerism in daily life. However, what I didn’t not expect was that I could also get to know myself better, like how we learn, memorize, and the self-concept.
This books introduces theories of consumer behavior, basic concepts and how consumer behavior influences marketing strategy in three parts, personality and psychographics of consumers as individuals, internal and external factors, and decision making process.
Section 2, “Consumers as Individuals” examines how the individual receives information and how this material is learned, stored in memory, and used to form and modify individual attitudes about products and about the self. Section 3, “Consumers as Decision Makers”, explores how consumers use the information they acquire to make decisions about consumption activities. Section 4, “Consumers and Sub-cultures” considers how consumers function as part of a larger social structure.
Here are some concepts I think useful in real life.
Consumer behavior refers to the process when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires.
Perceptual defense: People see what they want to see, and don’t see what they don’t want to see.
We experience events more intensely at first but then get used to them. When we experience an interruption and then start over, revert to the original intensity level.
Halo effect: tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas.
It’s more likely that we’ll retain incoming data when we associate it with other things already in memory.
In fact, we can think of marketing as a system that provides certain standards of living to consumers.
Hedonic adaptation: to maintain a fairly stable level of happiness, we tend to become used to changes, big or small, wonderful or terrible.
How do marketers influence self-esteem? By social comparison, which is a basic human tendency. They look for benchmarks who are happy, attractive people who happen to use their products.
We are what we consume. We are attached to an object to the extent we rely on it to maintain our self-concept. One of the first acts of institutions that want to repress individuality and encourage group identity, such as prisons or the military, is to confiscate personal possessions.
the foot-in-the-door technique: sales people know that a consumer is more likely to comply with a big request if he agrees to a smaller one.
basic psychological principles that influence people to change their minds or comply with a request: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, consensus
Loss aversion: we emphasize our loses more than our gains.
We’re more willing to take risks when we think we’re using someone else’s resources.