Consumer Decision Process

Consumer Decision Process

1. 1. Problem Recognition

   • How consumers recognize the problem. 
   • Examples Malfunction of a current purchase
   • Prompted in a variety of ways
   • Examples A desire for new things based on exposure to advertisements
   • 2. Information Search
     • 3. Evaluation of Alternatives
       • The way products are mentally grouped influences which alternatives will be considered, and some brands are more strongly associated with these categories than are others (i.e., they are more prototypical).
         • Alternatives were developed in the search stage
         • These alternatives make up that individuals 'Evoked Set' (Members of the evoked set share similar characteristics)
       • Used to simplify decision making:
         • Evaluative Criteria - dimensions used to judge the merits of competing options
         • Heuristics - mental rules of thumb
           • In particular, people may develop many market beliefs over time. One of the most common beliefs is that price is positively related to quality.
           • Other heuristics rely on well-known brand names or a product's country of origin as signals of product quality
           • When a brand is consistently purchased over time, this pattern may be due to true brand loyalty or simply to inertia because it's the easiest thing to do.
       • 4. When the consumer eventually must make a product choice from among their evaluation of alternatives, an number of decision rules may be used.
         • Noncompensatory decision rules eliminate alternatives that are deficient on any of the criteria the consumer has chosen to use.
         • Compensatory decision rules, which are more likely to be applied in high-involvement situations, allow the decision maker to consider each alternative's good and bad points more carefully to arrive at the overall best choice.
     • Example: Undertaking extensive fieldwork where the consumer consults a variety of sources to amass as much information as possible from a variety of sources
     • Examples: Scanning memory to determining what has been done to resolve the problem in the past