Your customer behaves in a certain way, here's your chance to understand it!

 

Consumer behavior pix from Robertson.com

Consumer or customer behavior can be described as the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society. That's text book!

  Not many people would go to the extent of analyzing customer behavior on the deeper level that we have here, but for some organizations its important to know just who there customers really are. The following are factors that help to define the customer from the external environment.
 I Culture, and Sub-culture: Everyone has cultural differences that define the person. Language and habits that are cultural based. Things like dress codes, how we conduct our marriages, the foods we eat, and the other ceremonies we get involved in such as religious based ceremonies, anniversaries that we mark and how we relate with visitors and strangers. 

ii. Social Class, and Social Group: Everyone belongs to one social class or another. Every community has a social strata with people belonging to different groups. We can define the groups according to laid down parameters that are available in our immediate environment. Obvious factors like wealth and family heritage define our social class and social group.  

iii. Family, and Inter-Personal Influences: The families we belong to will foster certain habits upon us such as the way we relate with people our values from the family perspectives as well as our beliefs about everyday life.  The people we relate with on regular basis would also influence a lot of these thoughts and ways of life. 

iv. Other Influences are not necessarily categorized by any of the above three, like geographical, political, economical, religious environment.

 

The Personality and Self-concept of the person concerned also affects the behavior of that person in and around goods and services. 

ii. Motivation and Involvement: What motivates people varies from one person to another depending on their background and orientation. Certain categories of people value leisure; the love to play tennis, golf or go cycling. Others see all of this as a waste of time. The pursuit of wealth and is also a major influence and motivation for some people. The things we like to a large extent will affect what services and products we buy. 

iii. Perception and Information Processing; The way we perceive goods and services around us would also affect our behavior of such products. Some people see fast food as junk and dangerous to the health of people while others feel those beliefs are not real and the people should be free to eat what they like without necessarily suffering ailments or disease. 

iv. Learning and Memory: Our learning and memory in terms of our education and things we were taught and still remember go to a large extent of affecting our disposition towards products and services. A person who did not get much schooling might not feel it necessary to read books unless he is really inspired to do so. All the things we are taught that we committed to memory have a bearing on almost everything we do in life, including our purchases and our buying power. 

v. Attitudes: We have attitudes towards all things that are around us. There are somethings that we value(Please see my article: Understand your marketing environment and maximize your profit! http://alexogundadegbe.blogspot.com.ng/2016/09/   There also things that we dont care about
        Everyone has an attitude towards, computers, mobile phones, food, drink, leisure, pleasure etc. So our attitude goes a long way in determining how we react or respond to certain products, goods and services.