Consumer Marketing Strategy Behavior
When stepping foot onto the marble floors of a typical shopping mall, consumers are dazzled with a variety of products from companies vying for their money. However, businesses must first understand what compels people to buy -- or reject -- their product. Extensive marketing efforts by corporate strategists attempt to sway consumer behavior in a number of ways.
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Understand Behavior
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Companies must first understand behavior in order to change it. Therefore, businesses spend copious resources studying it using several methods. In some cases, representatives pore over video cameras assessing the placement of the products on the store shelves and how consumers react to it. In other instances, companies conduct samples and submit surveys. Using these results, businesses modify their product to fit consumer preferences.
Influence Behavior
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Buyer behavior can be influenced using several marketing tactics that instill name brand recognition. Tactics to achieve this task include marketing campaigns such as commercials, sweepstakes and product placements in popular shows and movies. Advertisements attempt to sway consumer behavior by choosing images, music and styles that relate best to the targeted demographic. Common marketing approaches are steeped in famous psychological studies by Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud. Pavlov's study of using a ringing bell to elicit hunger in a dog relates to the ways corporations use jingles to evoke thoughts of their brand. Influencing consumer behavior to sway the consumer toward selecting their product also entails engendering a sense of trust and confidence in the product. This is achieved by community outreach programs like corporate sponsorship of local baseball teams or volunteer services.
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Maintain Behavior
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Few companies want to be a flash-in-the-pan fad amongst its consumers. While success is immediate, profits are not long-lasting. Thus, a third objective of buyer behavior is ensuring a long-lasting impression and turning consumers into repeat buyers. Maintaining buying behavior entails offering loyalty programs and discounts for repeat buyers. Companies must also quell pressure from competitors offering a similar product by clearly differentiating it from others. Elizabeth Parsons and Pauline Maclaran, authors of "Contemporary Issues in Marketing and Consumer Behavior" explain corporate brand culture is a way in which companies instill loyalty not to the product, but to the entire business. They cite the Virgin brand as an example: The organization's founder, Richard Branson, transfers the concepts of rugged individualism and radicalism to the product image as ways of gaining consumer loyalty.
Considerations
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Consumer behavior strategy must be amended for companies looking to expand overseas. What influences consumers to buy in one culture may not translate to foreign countries. Marieke K. de Mooij, author of "Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes" states the very concepts of individualism and self are inherently Western. Thus, marketers appealing to Asian societies must explain the way in which a product helps the consumer relate to others and society as a whole.
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