Introduction to Consumer behaviour

According to Engel, Blackwell, and Mansard,

‘Consumer behaviour is the actions and decision processes of people who purchase goods and services for personal consumption’.

According to Louden and Bitta,

‘Consumer behaviour is the decision process and physical activity, which individuals engage in when evaluating, acquiring, using or disposing of goods and services’.

Introduction to Consumer behaviour in Marketing

The study of consumer behaviour (CB) is very important to the marketers because it enables them to understand and predict buying behaviour of consumers in the marketplace; it is concerned not only with what consumers buy, but also with why they buy it, when and where and how they buy it, and how often they buy it, and also how they consume it & dispose it.According to Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School, the study of Consumer Behaviour is one of the most important in business education, because the purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.

Customers are created and maintained through marketing strategies. And the quality of marketing strategies depends on knowing, serving, and influencing consumers. In other words, the success of a business is to achieve organisational objectives, which can be done by the above two methods. This suggests that the knowledge & information about consumers is critical for developing successful marketing strategies because it challenges the marketers to think about and analyse the relationship between the consumers & marketers, and the consumer behaviour& the marketing strategy.

The term consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumer display in searching for purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of product and services that they expect will satisfy their needs. Consumer behavior focuses on how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources (time, money, effort) on consumption related items. This includes what they buy, why they buy it, when they buy it, where they buy it, how often they buy it, how often they use it, how they evaluate it after the purchase and the impact of such evaluation on future, and how they dispose of it.

In another words, consumer behavior can be define as the behaviour of individuals in regards to acquiring, using, and disposing of products, services, ideas or experiences. Consumer behavior also includes the acquisition and use of information. Thus, communication with consumers and receiving feedback for them is a crucial part of consumer behavior which is of great interest to marketer.