Marketing Knowledge Inventory, Unit 1, Page 1 of 5

Chapter 6: Consumer Markets and Consumer Buying

Behavior
Personal Characteristics Affecting Human Behavior
1. Consumer purchases are strongly influenced by cultural, social, personal, and
psychological characteristics. For the most part, they cannot be controlled by
the marketer, but they must be taken into account.
Cultural Factors
2. Culture is the most basic determinant of a persons wants and behavior. It
comprises the basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviors that a person
learns continuously in a society.
Subculture
3. Each culture contains smaller subcultures, or groups of people with shared
value systems based on common life experiences and situations.
Hispanic Consumers
4. Hispanics are very brand loyal, and they favor companies who show special
interest in them.
African American Consumers
5. Although more price conscious than other segments, blacks are also strongly
motivated by quality and selection.
Asian American Consumers
6. As a group, Asian consumers shop frequently and are the most brand
conscious of all the ethnic groups. They can be fiercely brand loyal.
Consumer Behavior Across International Cultures
7. Although consumers in different countries may have some things in common,
their values, attitudes, and behaviors often vary dramatically.
8. Marketers must decide on the degree to which they will adapt their products
and marketing programs to meet the unique needs of consumers in various
markets. They want to standardize their offerings in order to simplify
operations and take advantage of cost economies.
Social Class

Marketing Knowledge Inventory, Unit 1, Page 2 of 5

9. Marketers are interested in social class because people within a given class
tend to exhibit similar behavior, including buying behavior.
Groups and Online Social Networks
10.Groups that have a direct influence and to which a person belongs are called
membership groups.
11.People often are influenced by reference groups to which they do not belong.
12.The importance of group influence varies across products and brands. It
tends to be strongest when the product is visible to others whom the buyer
respects.
13.The family remains the most important consumer buying organization in
American society and has been researched extensively.
Roles and Status
14.Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society.
People often choose products that show their status in society.
Online Social Networking
15.Instead of throwing more one-way commercial messages at ad-weary
consumers, they hope to use social networks to interact with consumers and
become a part of their conversations and lives.
Age and Life-Cycle Stage
16.The types of goods and services people buy change during their lifetimes.
Preferences for leisure activities, travel destinations, food, and entertainment
are often age related.
17.A persons occupation affects the goods and services bought. For example,
construction workers often buy their lunches from industrial catering trucks
that come out to the job site.
Economic Situation
18.Companies must take advantage of opportunities caused by economic
upturns and take defensive steps when facing an economic downturn.
Lifestyle
19.Lifestyle portrays the whole person interacting with his or her environment.
Marketers search for relationships between their products and people who are
achievement oriented.

Marketing Knowledge Inventory, Unit 1, Page 3 of 5

Personality and Self-Concept
20.Personality can be useful in analyzing consumer behavior for some product or
brand choices.
21.The role of self-concept has a strong bearing on the selection of recreational
pursuits, including golf, sailing, dirt bike riding, fishing, and hunting.
Motivation
22.A person has many needs at any given time. Some are biological, arising from
hunger, thirst, and discomfort. Others are psychological, arising from states
of tension, such as the need for recognition, esteem, or belonging.
Maslows Theory of Motivation
23.Maslows hierarchy of needs in order of importance are:
a. physiological needs
b. safety needs
c. social needs
d. esteem needs
e. self-actualization needs.
Herzbergs Theory
24.Herzbergs theory has two implications.
a. sellers should do their best to avoid dissatisfiers (e.g., a poor service
policy).
b. Although these things will not sell a product, they might easily un-sell
it.
Perception
25.Perception is the process by which an individual selects, organizes, and
interprets information to create a meaningful picture of the world.
26.The key word in the definition of perception is individual.
Selective Attention
27.Selective attention means that marketers have to work hard to attract
consumers notice. The real challenge is to explain which stimuli people will
notice.
Selective Distortion
28.Selective distortion is the tendency to twist information into personal
meanings and interpret information in a way that will fit our preconceptions.
Selective Retention

Marketing Knowledge Inventory, Unit 1, Page 4 of 5

29.Because of selective retention, we are likely to remember good points
mentioned about competing products.

Learning
30.Learning describes changes in an individuals behavior arising from
experience.
Beliefs and Attitudes
31.Marketers are interested in the beliefs that people have about specific
products and services. Beliefs reinforce product and brand images.
32.Attitudes put people into a frame of mind for liking or disliking things and
moving toward or away from them. For example, many people who have
developed the attitude that eating healthy food is important perceive chicken
as a healthy alternative to beef and pork.
The Buyer Decision Process

33.
Need Recognition
34.The buying process starts when the buyer recognizes a problem or need.
Information Search
35.How much searching a consumer does will depend on the strength of the
drive, the amount of initial information, the ease of obtaining more
information, the value placed on additional information, and the satisfaction
one gets from searching.
36.By gathering information, consumers increase their awareness and
knowledge of available choices and product features.
Evaluation of Alternatives

Marketing Knowledge Inventory, Unit 1, Page 5 of 5

37.The set of beliefs held about a particular brand is known as the brand image.
38.A utility function shows how the consumer expects total product satisfaction
to vary with different levels of different attributes.

Purchase Decision
39.The consumer forms a purchase intention based on factors such as expected
family income, expected price, and expected benefits from the product.
Post-purchase Behavior
40.Following a purchase, the consumer will be satisfied or dissatisfied and will
engage in post-purchase actions of significant interest to the marketer.
41.Consumers feel uneasy about acquiring the drawbacks of the chosen brand
and losing the benefits of the rejected brands. Thus consumers feel some
post-purchase dissonance with many purchases, and they often take steps
after the purchase to reduce dissonance.