As macroenvironment and microenvironment affect companies’ way of doing marketing, major forces influence consumers’ behavior. Those forces can be cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors.
Cultural factors represent the learned values and perceptions that define a consumer’s wants and behaviors. Within a same culture individuals belong to different subcultures and social classes that define more precisesy those behaviors. Marketers often target consumers within a same social class because their members share the same interests and have a similar purchasing power.
Family, friends, social networks, and professional groups represent a great part of the social factors that affect buyers’ behavior. Consumers’ behaviors are mostly influenced by those groups and by the social role and status they play in each of those different groups. Consumers are first influenced by the groups they belong to but also by the groups they wish to belong to – those groups are called aspirational groups.
The third category of forces influencing consumer buyer behavior includes personal factors such as age, occupation, economic situation and lifestyle. Those factors are the ones that define each one of us in our society. That is why marketers use them to market the right product to the right people. For example, tie producers are no to target farmers and Red Bull will only targets young people with an active lifestyle in need for energy, not housewives.
The last and most personal factors influencing consumer buyer behavior are the psychological factors. I learned during a practicum I worked on for this topic (see Sources) that one same product can satisfy different people regarding different needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs represents the different levels people are driven by (see below). In the case of GoPro, the cameras the company sells fulfill two different needs. More than being a simple camera, a GoPro first fulfills an esteem need by allowing people to record and watch their amazing performances in a way that no other camera allows to and then fulfills a social need by allowing people to share their videos with a whole community of GoPro owners or simple viewers on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which create a sense of belonging to a group.
All those factors must be selected and mixed carefully in order to produce accurate marketing campaigns. Marketers must target the right people that would be the most receptive to those factors prior to consider the price or the packaging of the product.
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