Consumer Behavior According To The American Marketing Association Marketing Essay

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015

Marketers need to respect the fact that people and society can change over time. In the early1980s, consumer consumption is somewhat 'conspicuous'.Many firms ignored consumer input orpublicly confront consumer group (Evans and Berman, 1987).Consumers were not very knowledgeable about a number of products, especially industrial products such as automobiles of which many brands had not yet become a flagship marque. Thus, they did not know what they expected from the products.

In the 1990s, it is the era of 'value driven' customers and suppliers. The consumption can no longer be conspicuous. Consumers are exposed to more mass media. Commercial media becomesources of useful information on the ever increasing number of products and brands. Personal sources of information diminish in importance.In addition, traditional consumers become moreexperienced and their ability to distinguish between brands is sharpened. Marketers today need to understand that 'customer satisfaction is about 'attitude'; and customer value is about 'behavior''(Butz and Goodstein, 1996: 64).

According to Rosenblatt (1964), the ethnocentrism will usually have a positive attitude or manner for same group or the product made by their country, and a negative attitude toward the different group or the product made by different country. This means that a customer will make purchase decision which consider of the country of product or country-of-origin. Country of origin is generally described as the ''source country'' for a product or service provider, which may differ from the country of brand, assembly or design. Several studies has been found to significantly influence consumer perceptions of product performance and quality, these include price, brand, retail outlet and country of origin (Veale and Quester, 2009).

According to Safiek et al. (2001), those consumers who are having high tendency of ethnocentric will more prefer to buy domestic product. They will feel that if buying foreign product will hurt their country's economy. In essence, a highly ethnocentric people was proud to their own values, culture, symbols and hold in values and object for the different group because they will feel that buying foreign or import product will directly hurt their country's economy and bring the impact such as unemployment. In contrast, low tendency of ethnocentric are more preferred to purchase the foreign products. They will view the foreign product or import product as a symbol of status, and they are more prefer to buy foreign product to make them have a highest status.

According to Triandis (1994), collectivism means that the people will dependence with other people in the same group and get together with group which include their family and friends. Besides, according to Sharma et al. (1995), collectivist will consider the outcome before they take the actions. Consumers who are collectivism will choose the product which are easily accept by other people (Wickliffe and Pysarchik, 2001). In Malaysia, some of the research has found that there are more influenced by the collectivism culture (Burns and Brady, 1992; Bochner, 1994).

The people who are collectivism also try to look for the similarity with other people and concern about the view of others people (Wickliffe and Pysarchik, 2001). The consumers who are more importance of the others people in the society, they will also more considered against the result of brand selection that decoded by them (Wickliffe and Pysarchik, 2001). The collectivism will influence the consumer when make choice between local car and foreign car. The marketers also can use advertisement if they are targeting those are collectivist (Kropp et al, 2005). The people who are highly collectivism will easily influence by the opinion leader, therefore the marketers of local car need to focus to attract the opinion leader for their group first (Mourali et al., 2005).

Nowadays, the consumer can get many brands of car to choose, the consumer will influenced heavily to the price (Thaler, 1985). As a result, we know that price is an important factor that the consumers need to be considered. As we know, nowadays most of the customers required a high quality services. Although service is an important factor, customers are nevertheless unwilling to pay an extra amount for obtain a higher level of service so that might be better off provide an acceptable level of service, while maintaining price as low as possible (Tse, 2001).

Furthermore, some consumer's general belief that higher quality products are more expensive and products of lesser quality are cheaper. High-priced brands are brands on the market whose image is seen as the key factor. Consumers of these brands often purchase them mainly for image and are willing to pay a premium price for their perceived high quality and status, which make them price-inelastic (Bolton, 1989; Fok et al., 2006). Low-priced brands tend to be purchased for utilitarian value, with the consumer relying on the perceived value for price. If consumers believe that price and quality are tied, then paying a lower price may not guarantee the quality of the product. Conversely, to gain better quality, a higher monetary sacrifice must be made, perhaps beyond that which is desirable to the consumer (Kardes et al., 2004).

When price deals offered, consumers will be momentarily attracted to the increased value for low-priced brands by the higher transaction utility (Yoo et al., 2000). However, price deals would lower the perception on quality and status especially for high-priced brands (Grewal et al., 1998). Fok et al. (2006) also find that brands with relatively frequent price deals are often considered of lower quality than similar, rarely promoted brands. In this research can be found that the relationship between the price and the consumer behavior when make decision to choose Japanese car.

Brand loyalty has been useful in predicting repeat purchase intentions behavior as well (Kasper, 1988). In today's highly competitive marketplace, retaining brand-loyal customers is critical for survival. In fact, it is estimated that the average company spends six times more to attract new customers in lieu of maintaining the current ones. (Olson & Peter, 1994).

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