Internal or psychological factors:
The
buying behaviour of consumers is influenced by a number of internal or
psychological factors. The most important ones Motivation and Perception.
a)
Motivation: A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of
intensity. A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to drive the person
to act. There can be of types of needs:
1.
Biogenic needs: They arise from physiological states of tension such as thirst,
hunger
2.
Psychogenic needs: They arise from psychological states of tension such as
needs for recognition, esteem
In
the words of William J Stanton, “A motive can be defined as a drive or an urge
for which an individual seeks satisfaction. It becomes a buying motive when the
individual seeks satisfaction through the purchase of something”. A motive is
an inner urge (or need) that moves a person to take purchase action to satisfy
two kinds of wants viz. core wants and secondary wants. So, motivation is the
force that activates goal-oriented behaviour. Motivation acts as a driving
force that impels an individual to take action to satisfy his needs. So it
becomes one of the internal factors influencing consumer behaviour.
b)
Perception: Human beings have considerably more than five senses. Apart from
the basic five (touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing) there are senses of
direction, the sense of balance, a clear knowledge of which way is down, and so
forth. Each sense is feeding information to the brain constantly, and the
amount of information being collected would seriously overload the system if
one took it all in. The brain therefore selects from the environment around the
individual and cuts out the extraneous noise.
In
effect, the brain makes automatic decisions as to what is relevant and what is
not. Even though there may be many things happening around you, you are unaware
of most of them; in fact, experiments have shown that some information is
filtered out by the optic nerve even before it gets to the brain. People
quickly learn to ignore extraneous noises: for example, as a visitor to someone
else’s home you may be sharply aware of a loudly ticking clock, whereas your
host may be entirely used to it, and unaware of it except when making a
conscious effort to check that the clock is still running.
Therefore
the information entering the brain does not provide a complete view of the
world around you. When the individual constructs a world-view, she then
assembles the remaining information to map what is happening in the outside
world. Any gaps (and there will, of course, be plenty of these) will be filled
in with imagination and experience. The cognitive map is therefore not a
‘photograph’; it is a construct of the imagination. This mapping will be
affected by the following factors:
1.
Subjectivity: This is the existing world-view within the individual, and is
unique to that individual.
2.
Categorisation: This is the ‘pigeonholing’ of information, and the pre-judging
of events and products. This can happen through a process known as chunking,
whereby the individual organises information into chunks of related items. For
example, a picture seen while a particular piece of music is playing might be
chunked as one item in the memory, so that sight of the picture evokes the
music and vice versa.
3.
Selectivity: This is the degree to which the brain is selecting from the
environment. It is a function of how much is going on around the individual,
and also of how selective (concentrated) the individual is on the current task.
Selectivity is also subjective: some people are a great deal more selective
than others.
4.
Expectation: These lead individuals to interpret later information in a
specific way. For example, look at this series of numbers and letters: In fact,
the number 13 appears in both series, but in the first series it would be
interpreted as a В because that is what the brain is being led to expect.
5.
Past experience: This leads us to interpret later experience in the light of
what we already know. Psychologists call this the law of primacy, Sometimes
sights, smells or sounds from our past will trigger off inappropriate
responses: the smell of bread baking may recall a village bakery from twenty
years ago, but in fact the smell could have been artificially generated by an
aerosol spray near the supermarket bread counter. The consumer uses the input
selector to select clues and assign values to them. For quality, the cues are
typically price, brand name and retailer name. There are strong positive
relationships between price and quality in most consumers’ perceptions, and
brand name and quality; although the retailer name is less significant, it
still carries some weight.
For
example, many consumers would feel confident that Big Bazaar would sell
higher-quality items than the local corner shop, but might be less able to
distinguish between Food Bazaar and Giant hyper store. The information is
subjective in that the consumer will base decisions on the selected
information. Each of us selects differently from the environment and each of us
has differing views. Information about quality will be pigeonholed, or
categorised: the individual may put Scoda Octavia in the same category as
Mercedes Benz or perhaps put Sony in the same slot as Aiwa.
2. Social factors:
Man
is a social animal. Hence, our behaviour patterns, likes and dislikes are
influenced by the people around us to a great extent. We always seek
confirmation from the people around us and seldom do things that are not socially
acceptable. The social factors influencing consumer behaviour are a) Family, b)
Reference Groups, c) Roles and status.
a)
Family: There are two types of families in the buyer’s life viz. nuclear family
and Joint family. Nuclear family is that where the family size is small and
individuals have higher liberty to take decisions whereas in joint families,
the family size is large and group decision-making gets more preference than
individual. Family members can strongly influence the buyer behaviour, particularly
in the Indian contest. The tastes, likes, dislikes, life styles etc. of the
members are rooted in the family buying behaviour. The family influence on the
buying behaviour of a member may be found in two ways
i)
The family influence on the individual personality, characteristics, attitudes
and evaluation criteria and
ii)
The influence on the decision-making process involved in the purchase of goods
and services. In India, the head of the family may alone or jointly with his
wife decides the purchase. So marketers should study the role and the relative
influence of the husband, wife and children in the purchase of goods and
services. An individual normally lives through two families:
Family
of orientation: This is the family in which a person takes birth. The
influences of parents and individual’s upbringing have a strong effect on the
buying habits. For instance, an individual coming form an orthodox Tamil or
Gujarati vegetarian family may not consume meat or egg even though she may
appreciate its nutritional values
Family
of procreation: This is the family formed by an individual with his or her
spouse and children. Normally, after marriage, an individual’s purchasing
habits and priorities change under the influence of spouse. As the marriage
gets older, the people usually settle in certain roles. For instance, a father
normally takes decisions on investment whereas the mother takes decision on
health of children.
From
a marketing viewpoint, the level of demand for many products is dictated more
by the number of households than by the number of families. The relevance of
families to marketing is therefore much more about consumer behaviour than
about consumer demand levels .In terms of its function as a reference group,
the family is distinguished by the following characteristics:
i.
Face-to-face contact: Family members see each other every day and interact as
advisers, information providers and sometimes deciders. Other reference groups
rarely have this level of contact.
ii.
Shared consumption: Durables such as refrigerators, washing machines,
televisions and furniture are shared, and food is collectively purchased and
cooked. Purchase of these items is often collective; children even participate
in decision making on such major purchases as cars and houses.
iii.
Subordination of individual nee: Because consumption is shared, some family
members will find that the solution chosen is not one that fully meets their
needs
iv.
Purchasing agent: Because of the shared consumption, most families will have
one member who does most, or all of the shopping. Traditionally, this has been
the mother of the family, but increasingly the purchasing agents are the older
children of the family and even pre-teens are sometimes taking over this role.
The
reason for this is the increase in the number of working mothers who have less
time for shopping. This has major implications for marketers, since pre-teens
and young teens generally watch more TV than adults and are therefore more open
to marketing communications.
Role
specialisation is critical in family decision making because of the sheer
number of different products that must be bought each year in order to keep the
family supplied. What this means in practice is that, for example, the family
member responsible for doing the cooking is also likely to take the main
responsibility for shopping for food. The family member who does the most
driving is likely to make the main decision about the car and its accessories,
servicing, fuelling and so forth; the family gardener buys the gardening
products, and so on.
Culture
has a marked effect on family decision-making styles. Religion and nationality
will often affect the way decisions are made. Indian cultures tend to be male
dominated in decision-making, whereas European and North American cultures show
a more egalitarian pattern of decision-making.
There
are two issues here for the marketer: first, what is the effect on the marketing
mix of the multiethnic society like in India; and secondly, what is the effect
when dealing internationally? This is a somewhat sensitive area and the
marketers are still getting to grips with.
Social
class creates patterns of decision-making. Among very wealthy families, there
appears to be a greater tendency for the husbands to make the decisions, but at
the same time the norms of purchase tend to be well established and therefore
discussion is unnecessary.
Lower-class
families, with low incomes, tend to be more matriarchal, with the wives often
handling the financial decisions about rent, insurance, grocery and food bills
without reference to the husbands. Middle-class families tend to show greater
democratic involvement in decision-making. These social class distinctions are
gradually breaking down, however, as a result of increasing wealth and mass
education.
The
family may well adopt different roles according to the decision-making stage.
At the problem recognition stage of, for example, the need for new shoes for
the children, the children themselves may be the main contributors. The mother
may then decide what type of shoes should be bought, and the father may be the
one who takes the children to buy the shoes. It is reasonable to suppose that
the main user of the product might be important in the initial stages, with
perhaps joint decision making at the final purchase.
Other
determinants might include such factors as whether both parents are earning. The
double income families generally take decisions jointly because each has a
financial stake in the outcome. Gender role orientation is clearly crucial to
decision making. Husbands (and wives) with conservative views about gender
roles will tend towards the assumption that most decisions about expenditure
will be made by the husband. Even within this type of decision-making system,
however, husbands will usually adjust their own views to take account of their
wife’s attitudes and needs.
The
family is a flexible concept, and families go through life cycles. There have
been various versions of the family life cycle, but most are based on the
original work of Wells and Gubar. Following table shows the stages of the
family life cycle.
Single
people like student, unemployed youth or professionals at their age tend to
have low earnings, but also have low outgoings so have a high discretionary
income. They tend to be more fashion and recreation orientated, spending on
clothes, music, alcohol, eating out, holidays, leisure pursuits and hobbies.
They may buy cars and items for their first residence away from home.
Newlyweds
without children are usually dual-income households (Double Income No Kids
commonly known as DINK) and therefore usually well off. They still tend to
spend on similar things to the singles, but also have the highest proportion of
expenditure on household goods, consumer durables and appliances. Appear to be
more susceptible to advertising.
When
the first child arrives, one parent usually stops working outside the home, so
family income drops sharply. The baby creates new needs, which alter
expenditure patterns: furniture and furnishings for the baby, baby food,
vitamins, toys, nappies and baby food. Family savings decline, and couples are
usually dissatisfied with their financial position.
The
youngest child is over 6, so often both parents will work outside the home. The
employed spouse’s income has risen due to career progression, and the family’s
total income recovers. Consumption patterns still heavily influenced by
children: bicycles, drawing or swimming lessons, large-size packages of
breakfast cereals, cleaning products, etc.
Family
income improves, as the children get older. Both parents are likely to be
working outside the home and both may have had some career progression; also,
the children will be earning some of their own money from part-time jobs, etc.
Family purchases might be a second car, replacement furniture, some luxury
items and children’s education.
Children
have grown up and left home. Couples are at the height of their careers and
spending power, have low mortgages, very reduced living costs. Often go for
luxury travel, restaurants and theatre, so they need fashionable clothing,
jewellery, diets, spas, health clubs, cosmetics or hairdressing.
Main
breadwinner has retired, so some drop in income. Expenditure is more health
orientated, buying appliances for sleep, over-the-counter (OTC drugs like
Crocin, Disprin, Gellusil) remedies for indigestion. They often buy a smaller
house or move to an apartment in suburbs.
Solitary
survivor: If they still are in the workforce, widows and widowers enjoy a good
income. They may spend more money on holidays, as well as the items mentioned
in empty nest II.
Retired
solitary survivor: Same general consumption pattern is evident as above, but on
a smaller scale due to reduced income. They have special needs for love,
affection and security, so may join local clubs for aged etc.
The
family life cycle is a useful rule-of-thumb generalisation, but given the high
divorce rate and the somewhat uncertain nature of career paths, it is unlikely
that many families would pass through all the stages quite as neatly as the
model suggests. The model was developed in 1965 and 1966 and should therefore
be treated with a degree of caution
Influence
of children on buying decisions: First-born children generate more economic
impact than higher-order babies. First-born and only children have a higher
achievement rate than their siblings, and since the birth rate is falling,
there are more of them proportionally. More and more couples are choosing to
have only one child and families larger than two children are becoming a
rarity. Childlessness is also more common now than it was 30 years ago.
Children
also have a role in applying pressure to their parents to make particular
purchasing decisions. The level of ‘pester power’ generated can be
overwhelming, and parents will frequently give in to the child’s demands. This
is substantiated by the spurt of cartoon channels like Cartoon Network, Pogo,
Nick, Animax, Hungama or Splash, all of which depend on the advertisements of
all possible products in which children have their influence over their
parents. Although the number of children is steadily declining, their
importance as consumers is not. Apart from the direct purchases of things that
children need, they influence decision making to a marked extent. Children’s
development as consumers goes through five stages:
1.
Observing
2.
Making requests
3.
Making selections
4.
Making assisted purchases
5.
Making independent purchases
Recent
research has shown that pre-teens and young teens have a greater influence on
family shopping choices than do the parents themselves, for these reasons:
i.
Often they do the shopping anyway, because both parents are working and the
children have the available time to go to the shops.
ii.
They watch more TV, so are more influenced by advertising and more
knowledgeable about products.
iii.
They tend to be more attuned to consumer issues, and have the time to shop
around tor.
b)
Reference group: A group is two or more persons who share a set of norms and
whose relationship makes their behaviour interdependent. A reference group is a
group of people with whom an individual associates. It is a group of people who
strongly influence a person’s attitudes values and behaviour directly or
indirectly. Reference groups fall into many possible grouping, which are not
necessarily to be exhaustive (i.e. non over-lapping). The various reference
groups are:
i)
Membership or contractual groups: They are those groups to which the person
belongs, and interacts. These groups have a direct influence on their member’s
behaviour.
ii)
Primary or normative groups: They refer to groups of friends, family members,
neighbours co-workers etc whom we see most often. In this case, there is fairly
continuous or regular, but informal interaction with cohesiveness and mutual
participation, which result in similar beliefs and behaviour within the group.
iii)
Secondary groups: They include religious groups, professional groups etc, which
are composed of people whom we see occasionally. These groups are less
influential in shaping attitudes and controlling behaviour but can exert
influence on behaviour within the purview of the subject of mutual interest.
For example, you can be member of a philately or literary club where you can
discuss on mutually interesting subjects.
iv)
Aspiration group: These are group to
which a person would like to join as member. These groups can be very powerful
in influencing behaviour because the individual will often adopt the behaviour
of the aspirational group in the hopes of being accepted as a member. Sometimes
the aspirational groups are better off financially, or will be more powerful;
the desire join such groups is usually classed as ambition.
For
example, a humble office worker may dream of one day having the designation to
be present in the company boardroom. Advertising commonly uses images of
aspirational groups, implying that the use of a particular product will move
the individual a little closer to being a member of an aspirational group. Just
consider Nokia 6230 ad campaign where an young man with Nokia mobile is shown
to be capable to go the top position in the company, thus instigating you to
use the same model in order to join the same aspirational group.
v)
Dissociative or avoidance groups: These are groups whose value an individual
rejects and the individual does not want to be associated with. For example, a
senior corporate executive does not want to be taken as a teenager. Hence, the
individual will try to avoid certain products or behaviours rather than be
taken for somebody from the dissociative group. In the just given example, the
executive may not use cigarette, perfume or car, which are very much
teenager-oriented. Like aspirational groups, the definition of a group as
dissociative is purely subjective and it varies from one individual to the
next.
vi)
Formal groups: These groups have a known list of members, very often recorded
somewhere. An example might be a professional association, or a club. Usually
the rules and structure of the group are laid down in writing. There are rules
for membership and members’ behaviour is constrained while they remain part of
the group.
However,
the constraints usually apply only to fairly limited areas of behaviour; for
example, the association of Chartered Accountants (CA) or the Cost Accountants
have laid down the codes of practice for their members in their professional
dealings, but has no interest in what its members do as private citizens.
Membership of such groups may confer special privileges, such as job
advancement or use of club facilities, or may only lead to responsibilities in
the furtherance of the group’s aims.
vii)
Informal groups: These are less structured, and are typically based on
friendship. An example would be an individual’s circle of friends, which only
exists for mutual moral support, company and sharing experiences. Although
there can be even greater pressure to conform than would be the case to a
formal group, there is nothing in writing.
Often
informal groups expect a more rigorous standard of behaviour across a wider
range of activities that would a formal group; such circles of friends are
likely to develop rules of behaviour and traditions that are more binding than
written rules.
viii)
Automatic groups: These are those groups, to which one belongs by virtue of
age, gender, culture or education. These are sometimes also called category
groups. Although at first sight it would appear that these groups would not
exert much influence on the members’ behaviour, because they are groups, which
have not been joined voluntarily, it seems that people are influenced by group
pressure to conform. For example, when buying clothes, older people are
reluctant to look like a teenager and hence they normally do not buy jeans.
ix)
Indirect groups: In this case, the customers are not in direct contact with the
influencers. For example, a film star like Shah Rukh Khan pitches for Santro
car, it obviously has a deep influence over the blind fan
x)
Comparative groups: The members of this group are those with whom you compare
yourself. For example, you may compare yourself with your brother or sister
(sibling rivalry) or the colleagues and try to emulate by possessing some
unique products or brands like Modava watch or Christian Dior perfume.
xi)
Contactual group: The group with which we are in regular contacts like college
friends, office colleague.
c)
Roles and status: A person participates in many groups like family, clubs, and
organisations. The person’s position in each group can be defined in tern of
role and status. A role consists of the activities that a person is expected to
perform. Each role carries a status. People choose products that communicate
their role and status in society. Marketers must be aware of the status symbol
potential of products and brands.
3. Cultural factors:
Kotler observed that human behaviour is
largely the result of a learning process and as such individuals grow up
learning a set of values, perceptions, preferences and behaviour patterns as
the result of socialisation both within the family and a series of other key
institutions. From this we develop a set of values, which determine and drive
behavioural patterns to a very large extent.
According
to Schiffman and Kanuk, values include achievement, success, efficiency,
progress, material comfort, practicality, individualism, freedom,
humanitarianism, youthfulness and practicality. This broad set of values is
then influenced by the subcultures like nationality groups, religious groups, racial
groups and geographical areas, all of which exhibit degrees of difference in
ethnic taste, cultural preferences, taboos, attitudes and lifestyle.
The
influence of subcultures is subsequently affected by social stratification or
social class, which acts as a determinant of behaviour. Social class is
determined by a series of variables such as occupation, income, education and
values rather than by a single variable. People within a particular social
class are more similar than those from different social classes, but they can
move from one social class to other in due time and circumstances.
Cultural
factors consist of a) Culture, b) Sub culture and c) Social class.
a)
Culture: Culture is the most fundamental determinant of a person’s want and
behaviour. The growing child acquires a set of values, perception preferences
and behaviours through his or her family and other key institutions. Culture
influences considerably the pattern of consumption and the pattern of
decision-making. Marketers have to explore the cultural forces and have to
frame marketing strategies for each category of culture separately to push up
the sales of their products or services. But culture is not permanent and
changes gradually and such changes are progressively assimilated within
society.
Culture
is a set of beliefs and values that are shared by most people within a group.
The groupings considered under culture are usually relatively large, but at
least in theory a culture can be shared by a few people. Culture is passed on
from one group member to another, and in particular is usually passed down from
one generation to the next; it is learned, and is therefore both subjective and
arbitrary.
For
example, food is strongly linked to culture. While fish is regarded as a
delicacy in Bengal, and the Bengalis boast of several hundred different
varieties, in Gujarat. Rajastan or Tamil Naru, fish is regarded as mostly
unacceptable food item. These differences in tastes are explained by the
culture rather than by some random differences in taste between individuals;
the behaviours are shared by people from a particular cultural background.
Language
is also particularly culturally based. Even when a language is shared across
cultures, there will be differences according to the local culture; differences
between Hindi accents and choice of words of various places like Mumbai, Delhi
or Bihar are clearly understandable.
While
cultural generalities such as these are interesting and useful, it would be
dangerous to make assumptions about individuals from other countries based on
the kind of general findings in Hofstede’s work. Individuals from within a
culture differ more than do the cultures from each other: in other words, the
most individualistic Indian is a great deal more individualistic than the most
conformist American. Having said that, such generalisations are useful when
approaching mass markets and are widely used when planning mass advertising
campaigns such as TV commercials.
Culture
can change over a period of time, although such changes tend to be slow, since
culture is deeply built into people’s behaviour. From a marketing viewpoint,
therefore, it is probably much easier to work within a given culture than to
try to change it.
b)
Sub-Culture: Each culture consists of smaller sub-cultures that provide more
specific identification and socialisation for their members. Sub-culture refers
to a set of beliefs shared by a subgroup of the main culture, which include
nationalities, religions, racial groups and geographic regions. Many
sub-Cultures make up important market segments and marketers have to design
products and marketing programs tailored to their needs.
Although
this subgroup will share most of the beliefs of the main culture, they share
among themselves another set of beliefs, which may be at odds with those held
by the main group. For example, Indians are normally seen as orthodox,
conservative people, but rich, up-market youths do not hesitate to enjoy night
parties with liquor and women. Another example is that, the urban educated or
upper class exhibits more trace of individualism although Indian culture is
mostly collective in nature.
c)
Social class: Consumer behaviour is determined by the social class to which
they belong. The classification of socioeconomic groups is known as
Socio-Economic Classification (SEC). Social class is relatively a permanent and
ordered division in a society whose members share similar value, interest and
behaviour. Social class is not determined by a single factor, such as income
but it is measured as a combination of various factors, such as income,
occupation, education, authority, power, property, ownership, life styles,
consumption, pattern etc.
There
are three different social classes in our society. They are upper class, middle
class and lower class. These three social classes differ in their buying
behaviour. Upper class consumers want high-class goods to maintain their status
in the society. Middle class consumers purchase carefully and collect
information to compare different producers in the same line and lower class
consumers buy on impulse.
Again
there could be education considerations. A rich but not so educated people will
not normally buy a computer. We should consider another factor of social
mobility where a person gets up in the social ladder (for example, poor can
become middle class and middle class become rich or the children of uneducated
family can attain higher education) or down in the social ladder (for example,
rich can become poor or the children of a highly educated family may not
continue study).
Therefore
marketing managers are required to study carefully the relationship between
social classes and their consumption pattern and take appropriate measures to
appeal to the people of those social classes for whom their products are meant.
4. Economic Factors:
Consumer
behaviour is influenced largely by economic factors. Economic factors that
influence consumer behaviour are
a)
Personal Income,
b)
Family income,
c)
Income expectations,
d)
Savings,
e)
Liquid assets of the Consumer,
f)
Consumer credit,
g)
Other economic factors.
a)
Personal Income: The personal income of a person is determinant of his buying
behaviour. The gross personal income of a person consists of disposable income
and discretionary income. The disposable personal income refers to the actual
income (i.e. money balance) remaining at the disposal of a person after
deducting taxes and compulsorily deductible items from the gross income. An
increase in the disposable income leads to an increase in the expenditure on
various items. A fall in the disposable income, on the other hand, leads to a
fall in the expenditure on various items.
The
discretionary personal income refers to the balance remaining after meeting
basic necessaries of life. This income is available for the purchase of
shopping goods, durable goods and luxuries. An increase in the discretionary
income leads to an increase in the expenditure on shopping goods, luxuries etc.
which improves the standard of living of a person.
b)
Family income: Family income refers to the aggregate income of all the members
of a family. Family income influences the buying behaviour of the family. The
surplus family income, remaining after the expenditure on the basic needs of
the family, is made available for buying shopping goods, durables and luxuries.
c)
Income Expectations: Income expectations are one of the important determinants
of the buying behaviour of an individual. If he expects any increase in his
income, he is tempted to spend more on shopping goods, durable goods and
luxuries. On the other hand, if he expects any fall in his future income, he
will curtail his expenditure on comforts and luxuries and restrict his
expenditure to bare necessities.
d)
Savings: Savings also influence the buying behaviour of an individual. A change
in the amount of savings leads to a change in the expenditure of an individual.
If a person decides to save more out of his present income, he will spend less
on comforts and luxuries.
e)
Liquid assets: Liquid assets refer to those assets, which can be converted into
cash quickly without any loss. Liquid assets include cash in hand, bank
balance, marketable securities etc If an individual has more liquid assets, he
goes in for buying comforts and luxuries. On the other hand, if he has less
liquid assets, he cannot spend more on buying comforts and luxuries.
f)
Consumer credit: Consumer credit refers to the credit facility available to the
consumers desirous of purchasing durable comforts and luxuries. It is made
available by the sellers, either directly or indirect у through banks and other
financial institutions. Hire purchase, installment purchase, direct bank loans
etc are the ways by which credit is made available to the consumers.
Consumer
credit influences consumer behaviour. If more consumer credit is available on
liberal terms, expenditure on comforts and luxuries increases, as it induces
consumers to purchase these goods, and raise their living standard.
g)
Other economic factor
Other
economic factors like business cycles, inflation, etc. also influence the
consumer behaviour.
5.
Personal factor: Personal factors also influence buyer behaviour. The important
personal factors, which influence buyer behaviour, are a) Age, b) Occupation,
c) Income and d) Life Style
a)
Age: Age of a person is one of the important personal factors influencing buyer
behaviour. People buy different products at their different stages of cycle.
Their taste, preference, etc also change with change in life cycle.
b)
Occupation: Occupation or profession of a person influences his buying
behaviour. The life styles and buying considerations and decisions differ
widely according to the nature of the occupation. For instance, the buying of a
doctor can be easily differentiated from that of a lawyer, teacher, clerk
businessman, landlord, etc. So, the marketing managers have to design different
marketing strategies suit the buying motives of different occupational groups.
c)
Income: Income level of people is another factor which can exert influence in
shaping the consumption pattern. Income is an important source of purchasing
power. So, buying pattern of people differs with different levels of income.
d)
Life Style: Life style to a person’s pattern or way of living as expressed in
his activity, interests and opinions that portrays the “whole person”
interacting with the environment. Marketing managers have to design different
marketing strategies to suit the life styles of the consumers.
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