Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior, Patterns of Demand and Purchase Coursework

Essays on Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior, Patterns of Demand and Purchase Coursework The paper â€Å"Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior, Patterns of Demand and Purchase " is a  motivating version of coursework on marketing. Consumer behavior research enables better understanding and forecasting not only of the subject of purchases but also of purchasing motives and purchasing frequency (Schiffman, Kanuk 2004). One of the present fundamental presumptions for the consumer behavior research is the fact, that people often buy products not because of their main function but for their subjectively perceived value (Stà ¡vkovà ¡, Stejskal, and Toufarovà ¡, 2008). There are a lot of factors influencing consumers through the decision-making process. The literature classifies and structures these factors in various ways. From the point of view o the marketing planner, the mix of cultural, social, personal and psychological factors that influence behavior are largely uncontrollable. Given the fact that the influence they exert upon patterns of buying behavior, it would automatically become essentially that as many efforts as possible are put into the creation of an understanding of how these factors interact with each other and ultimately the manner in which they influence purchasing behavior. Factors influencing Consumer BehaviorCultural FactorsThe most fundamental of the four influencing factors and the therefore logically the starting point for any analysis of consumer behavior patterns is the buyer’s set of cultures. The factors of culture would include the culture, sub-culture, and social class. Of these it is the culture of the society that typically would be the most fundamental and enduring influence on behavior, given the fact that human behavior is very largely the result of our socialization, initially within the family and then increasingly within a series of other institutions such as schools, friendships groups, clubs and so on (Gilligan and Wilson, 2009). The broad set of values would be influenced in turn by the subcultures in which one is developed-these would include nationality groups, religious groups, racial groups, and geographical areas. Finally, the impact of the sub-cultures is ultimately defined by a third set of variables-those of social s tratification and in particular those of social classes. The idea here is based on the simple assumption that people within a given particular social class are more similar than those from different social classes and that the tastes and the demands of a group from a particular class would determine the ultimate taste and demand pattern of a given individual. Psychological factorsThese factors deal with the psychological processes that are built into the individual consumer’s system. The important aspect to be noted with respect to these psychological factors is that these factors are interlinked and these interlinkages result in behavior. For example, though perceptions and attitudes are conceptually different in terms of their applications in the marketing context, attitudes also contain a perceptual component (Kumar, 2008). The body of consumer behavior views them distinctively to focus on specific applications. This is done to provide conceptual clarity to students of consumer behavior views them distinctively to focus on specific applications; this is done to provide the student of consumer marketing a clear perspective. Personally, concepts are important among psychological factors because they pack a brand with an emotional appeal to the appropriate target segment of consumers. In most categories, consumers do not just look for functional benefits. They also look for symbolic gains-which are those that consumers perceive as beyond the functional qualities of a brand. These may be emotional in nature, might remove around self-concepts, be associated with brand appeal, or with human traits. The personality for the brand formulated with the personality or reference group principles may be reflected through brand imagery. Brand imagery is strongly associated with perception. As stated earlier this also illustrates the fact that psychological factors are interlinked.