What is the acquired behavior pattern that becomes nearly or completely involuntary?

Marketing is an activity conducted by the management of a company to plan and execute the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of its products.

The ultimate purpose of marketing is to create exchanges that satisfy the perceived needs, wants, and objectives of individuals and organizations.

Advertising -- IMC -- is just one of many tools applied in the promotion component of marketing.
How and where advertising is executed depends largely on the other aspects of the marketing mix (product, price, place) and for whom the messages are intended.

You are all consumers.
Give me some examples of a functional need for a product or service.

Give me some examples of a psychological want for a product or service.

Do you always want what you need? Do you always need what you want?

Marketing looks at the relationship between a customer’s needs and a product potential to satisfy that need. (Remember, consumers can be individuals or organizations.)

Through design, manufacturing, packaging, and promotion…
companies attempt to maximize the utility of a product: the ability to satisfy customers’ functional needs and their psychological wants.

These three parties continually interact in the process of marketing.

A market is:
a group of current customers, prospective customers, and noncustomers…
who share a common interest, need, or desire…
who have money to spend to satisfy needs or solve problems…
and who have the authority to make a purchase.

What would disqualify someone from being considered part of the target market for an ultra hi-def, 3D, wide-screen TV?

Promotional messages are designed for four broad categories of markets.

1. Consumer markets consist of people who buy for their own use.
- The consumer market accounts for almost two-thirds of all spending in the U.S. economy.

2. Business markets are made up of organizations that buy services, natural resources, and component products that they resell, use to conduct business, or use to produce another product.
- There are two important business markets:
-- Reseller markets buy products to sell them to others.
> For example, your grocery store buys fruit from orchards to resell it to their customers.

-- Industrial markets include firms that buy products and use them to produce other goods and services.
> Your Samsung phone is made of materials the company bought from other firms so they could manufacture the phone – and sell it to you.

3. Government markets buy products for municipal, state, federal, and other government activities.
- This might be printing services from a local print shop … or tanks from a defense contractor.

4. Transnational (or global ) markets include any of the other three markets (consumer, business, government) located in foreign countries.

To be successful in selling product to customers, marketers must understand why potential customers behave in certain ways.
Why do some people fill their grocery cart with frozen and processed foods – and others only buy organic meats and fresh produce?

Marketers devote considerable resources to studying consumer behavior:
“the mental and emotional processes and the physical activities of people who purchase and use goods and services to satisfy needs and wants”

Describe the consumer behavior of a middle-class mother of three small kids. What might drive her purchasing decisions?
How does her behavior – and her purchasing decisions -- differ from those of a wealthy retired woman?

Remember that the business market is also important.
So marketers also seek to understand the behavior of organizational buyers (the people who purchase products and services for use in business).

The consumer decision process involves a sequence of activities:
- Problem recognition
- Information search
- Evaluation and selection
- Store choice and purchase
- Postpurchase behavior (Remember the importance of satisfaction.)

Give me an example of these steps for a particular product purchase. What’s the problem? What does the information search involve?

- Nonpersonal influences (time, place, environment)

We’ll discuss these influences in more detail later, but for now…

Give some examples of an interpersonal factor that influenced your decision to make a purchase.
Give some examples of nonpersonal influences on a purchase you’ve made.
Have any of these influences left to purchases you’ve later regretted?

Remember that marketers want customers to make repeat purchases.
After we make a purchase, our postpurchase evaluation (Was I satisfied?) will affect whether we purchase a product again.

It begins with a stimulus (images, sounds, scents). This might be a compelling TV spot. Or the smell of bakery goods. Or a rave restaurant review from a colleague.

These stimuli first pass through physiological screens: the five senses that enable us to experience – and begin processing – any type of stimulus.
This is a very basic level of processing. If something smells bad, if a sweater feels scratchy, we certainly don’t want to buy it … end of story.

Psychological screens help us to evaluate, filter, and personalize the stimulus.
These screens may be innate factors, such as the consumer’s personality or instinctive human needs.
- Or they may be learned factors, such as a consumer’s self-concept, habits, or past experiences.

Based on the screening process (which occurs in an instant), the stimulus is either recognized as meaningful and is more fully processed – or it drops out of awareness.

Stimuli that resonate with a consumer then is integrated with mental files that reflect information, needs, and wants.

A TV spot for Panera soup airs. The consumer sees and hears it (physiological screens).
- One consumer thinks “I only like my own homemade soup. Take-out soup is expensive.” (psychological screens)
> The ad doesn’t resonate with them and it drops from their awareness.

- Another consumer thinks, “That soup looks good! Panera is a comfortable place to eat food.” (psychological screens)
> The ad resonates with the consumer and is integrated with mental files…
“I’m hungry. I need food. I want that soup. Panera is not far from me. I’ll go buy some soup right now.”

Students who saw the second ad reversed their preferences, with more than two-thirds preferring the web-only subscription and just 32 percent preferring the print and web combination. The preferred option from the first ad became the distant loser in the second.

operant conditioning
Learning that involves associating a behavior with rewards or punishments

social cognitive theory
Albert Bandura's theory describing how people learn from observing the rewards or punishments that accrue to others when they perform behaviors.

Persuasion occurs when a change in a person’s belief, attitude, or behavioral intention is caused by promotion communication (such as advertising).

One theory of persuasion is the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

Proponents of this model state there are two different routes to persuasion: central and peripheral.

In the peripheral route…
- Consumers are not in the market for a product and have low involvement with the product message.
- They have little reason to pay attention to the ad or to comprehend the central information.
- With shallow attention, they form few if any brand beliefs, attitudes, or purchase intentions.
- These consumers might pay attention to an ad peripherally, and any impressions may impact a future purchase decision.

If a TV or radio commercial comes on for a product you need, do you stop and pay attention to it?
If the commercial is for something you don’t need, do you completely block it out? Or do you take it in on some reduced level?

Learning produces attitudes and interests.
- An attitude is an acquired mental position regarding some idea or object.
In the context of consumers, attitudes usually result from our positive or negative evaluations of a purchase.

- Brand interest is an openness to or curiosity about a brand.

- Brand loyalty is the conscious or unconscious decision, expressed through intention or behavior, to repurchase a brand continually.
In the quest to obtain brand loyalty from consumers, companies have three aims related to habits:
1. Breaking habits. Get consumers to unlearn an existing purchase habit and try something new.
2. Acquiring habits. Teach consumers to repurchase their brand or repatronize their establishment.
3. Reinforcing habits. Remind current customers of the value of their original purchase and encourage them to continue purchasing.
Are there products you buy out of habit?
Do the purchases reflect your attitude about a product or brand?
Are you loyal to the product or brand? Or is your purchase simply habitual?

Motivation refers to underlying forces (or motives) that contribute to our actions.

Our motives stem from the conscious or unconscious goal of satisfying needs and wants.

- Needs are the basic, often instinctive, human forces that motivate us to do something.

- Wants are “needs” that we learn during our lifetime.

People are usually motivated to satisfy some combination of needs, which may be conscious or unconscious, functional or psychological.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs model.

According to this model…

- The lower physiological and safety needs dominate human behavior and must be satisfied before the higher, socially acquired needs (or wants) become meaningful.

- The highest need, self-actualization, is the culmination of fulfilling all the lower needs and reaching to discover the true self.

What type of product or service meets a physiological need? What meets a social need? What meets a self-actualization need?

Think of a recent purchase you made. What was it and which need did it fulfill?

- These are also called informational motives because the consumer actively seeks information to reduce the mental state.

- These are also called transformational motives because the consumer expects to be transformed in a sensory, intellectual, or social sense.
- They could also be called “reward” motives because the transformation is a rewarding state.

On the interpersonal side, family socializes our attitudes as consumers, beginning at a young age.
How many of you buy the same household or food products as your parents did when you were growing up?

Societal influences can take several forms.
The first is socioeconomic class. Most people think in terms of lower, middle, and upper class.
Marketers have segmented socioeconomic classes into numerous subgroups to help them better understand their purchasing behaviors.
Does someone living in a Manhattan townhouse approach purchasing decisions the same way as someone living in an Oklahoma City trailer? Not likely.

Time can influence a person’s sense of need for a product.
How many people buy a winter coat when they first appear in stores in late summer? Who buys a coat when it starts getting cold?

The place of sale also impacts the purchase decision.
- A person might need or want a particular item, but if the store is out of the way they may decide they can live without it ... For now.
What has diminished “place of sale” as a strong influence on consumer purchasing decisions? (E-commerce. Everything is conveniently available when you need it.)