There are several factors that influence consumer behavior, but four of the most important are cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors. Let’s take a closer look at each.
According to a Salesforce report, 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. This means that if you don’t understand what a consumer wants before they can tell you, they’re probably taking their business elsewhere.
Successful organizations build their marketing strategies with consumer behavior insights as the foundation. They’re not generating products and marketing plans based on their ideas alone; they are bringing external information into the fold to find out what customers want and how they want it, then interacting with them accordingly. This is the essence of creating a positive customer experience (CX), and CX means everything to fostering a loyal customer-base. Consider this stat from Qualtrics:
The organizations that not only solve, but best communicate that they solve, real consumer problems are the ones that win in the market today. Therefore, consumer behavior insights can be used to inform almost all areas of your marketing strategy. This may include what content you should be creating within your blogs and other content mediums, the types of stories you tell in your video and display advertisements, or even how you adjust your product lines to deliver what the consumer wants.
As an example, let’s consider the content your marketing teams could create in the coming months. If you’re a brand that specializes in products for men (like cufflinks, watches, or ties, for example), you might have a plan to create a bunch of blogs about gifting for men around certain holidays. Easy, right? Well, it certainly can be with the right information.
When analyzing consumer search behavior, you might find that there are a lot of searches around anniversary gifts for husbands. But what exact keywords are consumers typing into google? Will “gifts for men on anniversary” receive more hits than “ideas for husband anniversary gifts?” This subtle tweak in the way you use titles and keywords in your content could mean the difference between getting almost 10,000 site visitors or just above 1,000 from this content.
Understanding consumer behavior is essential for a company to find success for its current products as well as new product launches. Every consumer has a different thought process and attitude towards buying a particular product. If a company fails to understand the reaction of a consumer towards a product, there are high chances of product failure.
Due to the changing fashion, technology, trends, living style, disposable income, and similar other factors, consumer behavior also changes. A marketer has to understand the factors that are changing so that the marketing efforts can be aligned accordingly.
What is the importance of consumer buying behavior? This article outlines several of them.
1. Consumer Differentiation:
In marketing, consumer differentiation is a way to distinguish a consumer from several other consumers. This helps to make a target group of consumers with the same or similar behavior.
Though you have a targeted customer demographic in your business, you can still have variations between individual customers. Each group of consumers are different and their needs and wants differ from other groups. When a marketer is knowledgeable about the differentiation of each group of consumers, he can design separate marketing programs.
Consumer differentiation will help to tailor your strategies to the needs of varying customer groups. When consumer differentiation is done, you can expand the width and breadth of your services. You will be able to effectively serve a wider group of people.
2. Retention of Consumers:
“Consumer behavior is of most importance to marketers in business studies as the main aim is to create and retain customers,” says Professor Theodore Levitt (Kumar, 2004).
Consumer behavior is not just important to attract new customers, but it is very important to retain existing customers as well. When a customer is happy about a particular product, he/she will repeat the purchase. Therefore, marketing the product should be done in such a way that it will convince customers to buy the product again and again.
Thus, it is very evident that creating customers and retaining them is very important. This can be done only by understanding and paying attention towards the consumer’s buying behavior.
3. Design Relevant Marketing Program:
Understanding consumer behavior allows you to create effective marketing campaigns. Each campaign can speak specifically to a separate group of consumers based on their behavior.
For example, while targeting the kid’s market, you may have to look out for venues such as TV ads, school programs, and blogs targeting young mothers. You will need to take different messaging approaches for different consumer groups.
A study of consumer behavior enables marketers to understand what motivates consumers to make purchases. Furthermore, the same motive can be utilized in advertising media to stir the desire to make a purchase. Moreover, marketers should take decisions regarding the brand logo, coupons, packing, and gifts on the basis of consumer behavior.
4. Predicting Market Trend:
Consumer behavior analysis will be the first to indicate a shift in market trends. For example, the recent trend of consumers is toward environment-friendliness and healthy food. This changing market trend was observed by many brands including McDonalds. Based on consumer behavior, McDonald’s brought healthy food options.
By conducting a consumer behavior study, a company saves a lot of resources that might otherwise be allocated to produce a product that will not be sold in the market. For example, in summer a brand will not waste its resources producing a product that will not sell in summer. Based on consumer behavior the company decides on a production strategy which will save on warehouse costs and marketing costs.
5. Competition:
One of the most important reasons to study consumer behavior is to find out answers to some of the questions:
Is the customer buying from your competitor?
Why is a consumer buying from your competitor?
What features attract a consumer to your competitor’s products?
What gaps are your consumers identifying in your products when compared to your competitors?
Studying consumer behavior facilitates understanding and facing competition. Based on consumers’ expectations, your brand can offer competitive advantages.
6. Innovate New Products:
We all know some of the big names such as New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, Colgate Kitchen Entrées, Earring Magic Ken Doll, and Wheaties Dunk-a-Balls Cereal. Can you see the similarities in these products? Yes, they all failed!!
The sad truth is that most new products and new ideas end up in failure. There is an estimate of new product failures – they range from 33% to 90% based on the kind of industry.
Companies consistently strive hard to improve the success rate of their new products or new ideas. One of the most important ways is to conduct a sound and thoughtful consumer behavior study.
With the help of consumer behavior analysis, Nike realized that most of its target audience is not professional athletes, but many of them were striving to be more like them. So at the 2012 Olympics in London, Nike introduced a campaign to encourage athletics called ‘Find Your Greatness’. It aimed to promote the aspirations of being an athlete, not just with high-performing athletes but wanted to include all people regardless of their physical capability. The campaign was well planned and was data-driven, of course, carefully analyzed before taking any action. This message inspired many consumers and had enormous appeal to target consumers.
7. Stay Relevant in the Market
When the world is changing as rapidly as it is happening today, the biggest challenge we all face is staying relevant to our target market. And do you know what is the main reason behind the rapid changes? It is the ever-changing behavior of our customers.
Today’s consumers have greater choices and opportunities, which means they can easily switch to a company that offers better products and services.
“The pre-eminent skill required to shift ahead in the twenty-first century is the ability to see and seize.” -Adamson and Steckel, authors of Shift Ahead.
Losing relevance will only cost the company its market share. Haven’t we seen Sony Walkman failing to stay relevant in the digital music era, and the taxi industry doom with no preparedness to battle the UBER uprise!!
8. Improve Customer Service
Consumers require different levels of customer service, and understanding the differences within your customer base will help you provide the most appropriate service for individual needs.
For example, if you own an electronics store, high school or college students who buy a new laptop are more likely to understand the features they’re looking for than a person buying his first computer. With the first demographic, your service goal will be to provide information about the latest trends in technology, while with the second demographic, you’ll need to spend more time educating the customer, finding out what his specific needs are, and even teaching him how to use the features of his new electronic device.
In conclusion, understanding consumer buying behavior can help you create marketing videos that are more effective, resonate with your target audience, and track the success of your efforts. It also helps optimize the content and improve the conversion rates.