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BUYER BEHAVIOUR

Every organization and its success depend largely on level of satisfaction

they have provided to their buyer or consumers. Behind every purchase, consumers
are backed or influenced by certain reasons and these reasons are also called buyer
behavior and those behavior keeps on changing in different situations.

According to Philp Kotler, Buying behavior is the decision process and

acts of consumers involved in buying and using product.

According to Condiff, Still and Govani, Buying behavior may be viewed as

orderly process whereby the individual interacts with his or her environment for the
purpose of making market place decisions on products and services.

Hence, buying behavior means different activities and decisions carried

out by the buyers by purchasing different products in different marketing
environments.
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Factors Determining Consumer Buying Decisions.

Personal Psychological Social Factors Socio-cultural

Factors Factors Factors
Age Cultural factors
Motivation Family
Life-cycle Role and Culture & sub-
Perception
Occupation culture
Learning Status
Level of income Social class
Belief & Reference
Liquidity of
Attitude groups
assets Personality
Occupation
Life style

Consumer Buying Decision Process

Indentifying Needs/ Problems

Search for Information

Evalution of Alternatives

Purchase Decision

Post Purchase Behaviors

Fig: Stages in Consumer Buying Process.

(1) Identifying Needs/Problems.

This is the first stage in consumer buying process where, an
individual tries to identify and find out the hierarchy of their needs and wants. Among
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various needs and wants. Consumers also further evaluate their purchasing capacity
with the estimated price or tentative cost of the product.

(2) Search for Information

In this stage. Consumers seek the information about various
alternative products available the market. Alone with the products, basic information,
they also gather other relevant informations as availability of products and its
spares, warranty and guarantee, price operating instructions as well as other detail
information about the seller as well. In order to gather these information, consumers
may rely on different sources of information as personal source, experimental
source, commercial source, public source, etc. The major source of information is
commercial source due to increasing level of involvement of commercial activities in
the field of business and advertisement is its main branch.

(3) Evaluation of Alternatives.

Once the information is searched, consumers will then, identifies
and evaluate various available alternatives. During this stage, consumers are
engaged in assigning potential value to each of the available alternatives. Once the
evaluation is done, consumers will either intend to purchase the product or they will
reject them. If none of the product seems satisfactory, consumers will then start the
process from the beginning along with identifying needs or problem, the main
criteria's for evaluation one: price, tangible and intangible benefits of the products,
other benefits, place of purchase, after sales services, seller's history, etc.

(4) Purchase Decision.

In this stage, the actual purchase takes place. In other words in this
stage, purchase decision is made and buying process is concluded. Basically for
cheaper product and daily consumable products, purchase decision may keep on
changing as consumer may seek new and better product which is called trial
purchase. Once the consumer is satisfied through the trial purchase, they may
continue purchasing the same product. But, trial purchase is not possible while
purchasing bigger products with larger amount or expensive products. For eg: Buyer
will not carry out trial purchase of vehicles as once it is used will have high
depreciation and the purchase is non-refundable also, whereas, consumer may take
risk of buying new variety of shampoo as a trial purchase, variety of shampoo as a
trial purchase.

(5) Post Purchase Behavior :

It is the stage of the buyer decision process in which consumer

takes further action of purchase on the basis of their experiences, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction, etc they receive through the consumption of the product. This stage
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largely decides on the future purchase and consumption of the product. In case of
durable products, consumers may take three types of actions as they may
continuous product to other or they may hand-over the product to other or they may
dispose the product permanently.