Groups

Group influence and consumption.

A group is defined as two or more individuals who:

• share a set of norms
• have role relationships
• and experience interdependent behaviour

Groups influence the socialisation process or to put it another way they influence what we learn and how we behave. We all belong to groups, we pick up things by watching how those around us behave and we try to please them by doing those things to. This is because we have a desire to fit in and often go to great lengths to do so. It is this that influences our purchase decisions, because our preferences are shaped by the groups that we belong to. We can be influenced by team-mates, colleagues, friends, family, or even famous people who we have never met. There are many different groups that can influence purchase decisions as you can see form the diagram below:



Groups can have a huge impact on the products that we buy, for example, Burberry unfortunately picked up a lot of bad press for being associated with "chavs" it became associated with people who did bad things, therefore the A-lister who once purchased this famous and distinctive brand were put off greatly and sales in the UK for burberry dropped significantly. You can have a read of these articles to find out more: Burberry versus the Chavs.

And Burberry has shaken of its chav image.

Likewise someone of a lower class can be influenced by a product which is marketed to be luxurious and extravagant and therefore they would aspire to have this product to be seen by others as a little classier perhaps. It could be that "chavs" thought by wearing a fake version of Burberrry they were seen to be more up market.

Aspirational groups are often used by marketers because they use highly visible, widely admired and idealized figures, a good example are the following adverts:

• Gillette Fusion
• Gillette- David Beckham
• Sharpies
• Virgin Mobile

Maslows hierarchy of needs includes the need to belong, to have love, friendship and to be accepted by others. Marketers and advertisers use 'belonging' as a pivotal message in ad campaigns. We look to our reference groups, our colleagues/neighbours, for influence on purchase decisions on things such as brands, things that may give us a sense of status, luxurious goods. If marketers can create a strong brand image and market at the correct group then it is more likely that a person will then pass on to their reference group how they feel about a product and how much they like it, therefor it will have a better chance at succeeding tin the market. Likewise our peers can have a huge influence on our purchase decisions, by what is regarded as 'cool' or not. We look to the behaviour of others to provide a guide and to reassure our self-evaluation. Consumers tend to be selective about whom they use as benchmarks and in general, for social comparisons, people tend to use a Co-ordinated Peer, or a person of equivilant standing. Take a look/listen to this, i found it very interesting: Social Influence Marketing.

Values

Involvement, Values and Attitudes

The objective of today's lecture was to learn and understand how a persons level of motivation and degree of involvement affect their behaviour and furthermore understand how that persons values and attitudes also affect their behaviour and then to show how a marketer can exploit this and use it to their advantage.

Values are defined as the the ideals, customs, institutions etc of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive such as cleanliness, freedom or education, or negative such as cruelty crime or blasphemy.

"If we believe our overall values drive our behaviour, then we should be concentrating on the important, underlying motives that drive consumers to make product or service choices rather than simply product attributes" (Reis and Trout 1985).

When it comes to marketing and linking this with consumer involvement, values will have a greater impact on those products which require high involvement this is because people have specific terminal values or end states and many of the products and services purchased will help to attain that persons value related goal, that could be any of the following according to Kahles list of values:

1. Self respect


2. Excitement


3. Being well respected


4. Self-fulfilment


5. Sense of accomplishment

1. Warm relationship with others


2. Security

1. Fun and enjoyment


2. Sense of belonging

For example being well respected for some people can mean having the latest gadgets i.e mobile phones and cars, and these people believe that the high end goods will gain respect. Alongside this people may then feel a sense of accomplishment once attaining these goods they have aspired to. Research shows that in 1967 the most important value to people was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life with the least important being to become an expert in finance and eccomerce. Whereas in 1985, a mear 18 years later, the most imprtant value to people was to be well off financially and the least important being to clean up the environment. But why is it that we have become a world obsessed with money...perhaps people are getting to carried away with their aspirations that they are concentrating to much on the materialisitc things in life rather than the really important things in life such as family etc.

Personally my values have been shaped through the different stages in my life and through the different experiences i have gone through, which is how it will work for most people. Everyone will have different values and different orders of importance for things in their lives. My family and friends impact my values on security, sense of belonging and warm relationships with others, and if my relationships with family and friends change then subsequently so will my values. With this in mind i believe that along with our values changing over time so do the ways in which we make purchase decisions.

Below is an advert which i feel shows sense of accomplishment:



Click on the link to see an advert that shows a sense of belonging: The AA Vintage TV ad.

Below you will see the VALS framework. VALS is 'a marketing and consulting tool that helps businesses worldwide develop and execute more effective strategies. The system identifies current and future opportunitites by segmenting the consumer market place on the basis of personality traits that drive consumer behaviour'. So the aim of the VALS test is to measure the underlying psychological motovations and resources that many consumers share that predict each groups typical choice as consumers.



After taking the VALS test myself the results showed that i am an innovator. Innovators are said to be successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem. They are a very active consumer, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products or services. Image is also important to the innovator, not through power or status but as an expression of taste, independance and personality. Their lives are characterised by variety. Their possesions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life. For me this is weirdly funny because when my mum asks me to justify why i spend so much money on nice clothes, shoes, etc i reply with "Its because i like the finer things in life".
My secondary type is the experiencer, motivated through self-expression. A young, enthusiastic and impulsive consumer. Experiencers are avid consumers and spend a comparatively high proportion of their income on fashion, entertainment and socialising. This would be spot on for me!! Take the test for yourself by following this link: The VALS survey.

Gift Giving.

Is gift giving always an involved decision?

Do you dread the thought of birthdays and christmas' because you just dont know what to buy people year after year. I know i do.
Going back to buyer involvement in purchase decisions, we generally have low involvement for essential goods like bread or milk, and high involvement for more expensive goods such as cars, houses etc.

But do we really put so much thought into what we buy people, how much involvement do we really have when it comes to purchasing gifts. Laurent and Kapferer (1985) argue that a consumers level of involovement will be affected by four components:

1. Importance and Risk (FTPEPS)
2. Probability of making a bad purchase
3. Pleasure value of product category
4. Sign value of product category

According to involvement scores for various products conducted by Laurent and Kapferer, items such as clothes and perfume have high involvement because the importance of perceived risk is high and also because the probability of making an erroneous choice is also high!! Symbolism as a value driver will play an important part here as certain brands, especially with clothes and perfume, carry with them certain perceptions and status. Therefore these purchase require high involvement as there are many factors to consider by the gift giver.



Danziger (2004) believes that gift giving is about emotionally connecting giver and recipient and that the goal is to achieve a special feeling by communicating a message to the recipient. However problems can occur when the giver and the recipients value drivers are different.





Gift giving is right brain dominated (emotional) (Which could possibly be the reason why men get it so wrong because their left side of the brain is dominant!)
More often than not though its the experience that counts when it comes to gift giving, for example when shops offer gift wrapping services and things like scented beads in your bag at La Senza etc.

Skip to the end of this clip below (about 6.00 minutes in) this shows that perhaps when it comes to gift giving its the thought that counts!!

Heuristics, Memory and Nostalgia

Tricking people out of their buying habits!

Heuristics:

As we have looked at previously Kotler's buying decision process has 5 stages. But do we really take into consideration all of these stages with every product we buy? My answer is no we dont, we couldnt possibly, otherwise we would spend most of our time standing in shops unable to make up our minds. To make decisions simpler for consumers we often employ decision rules that allow us to use certain things as substitutes for others. Assumptions can be subtitutes, like assuming that you will get exactly what you need at a particular shop so you wont even take into consideration any of the competitiors. This then serves as a short cut, an easier route to come to a conclusion. Consumers often fall back on Heuristics. Heuristics are defined by solomon as "mental rules of thumb that lead to a speedy decision" for instance buying the most expensive product would suggestto you that it will be the producty of best quality, or buy the same brand as you bought last time bacause you know you liked it and therefore is a safe option, or buying the same products or brands that you grew up with in your own household. This is something i notice myself doing alot of the time. I will buy tetleys teabags because its what i have always drank at home! Kotlers buying decision process assumes optimisation rather than satisfaction, but when buying heuristically it is the other way around, it is satisfaction that is focused on rather than optimisation, as previously mentioned when shopping in a supermarket it is not optimisation we are looking for but rather those goods that have satisfied us in the past. We will often use fast and frugal heuristics-"making quick decisions when there is a lot of choice" (Williams 2001). The ways in which these fast and frugal heuristic decision are made are by the following:

• Recognition-(you are more likely to buy the one you know than a new model)- Branding
• Minimalist-(recognition plus one random criteria- works for low involvement e.g. recognition plus nice label)- Advertising
• Take the last-(use the last criteria applied to a similar situation)- Habit
• Take the best-(assesses the options in order of perceived importance of criteria-still only uses one reason)- Branding/USP.

Memory:

"Learning is the acuisition of knowledge, and memory is the storage of internal representations of that knowledge" (Blakemore 1988)

Basic learning principles are at the heart of many consumer purchase decisions. this is important to marketers as consumers are seen to be complex problem solvers who learn rules and concepts by watching others. We learn when we are not even trying to- incidental learning. We recognise brand names and remember jingles even though we do not use those specific products ourselves. Learning is an ongoing process, much like perception, because we are constantly exposed to new stimuli therefore changing our behaviour accordingly.

"Every time an advert or commercial appears, the objective is to have the reader or viewer learn something...and remember what he learned" (Britt 1955). This is crucial for businesses because an advert which is not remembered means they then have a product which is not remembered therefore not bought, and so the brand will be at a loss.


Memory involves a process of gaining information and storing it over time until it is needed. Studies assume that memory has am information process approach, much like a computer does. Whereby information is input, processed and output for later use. Memory is thought to take place in 3 stages:

• Encoding- information is entered into the memory
• Storage- information is retained in memory
• Retrieval- Information stored in memory is found as needed.
  

All of our memories are locked in our heads and are kept in our heads until we are prompted to recall these memories. It is this information that we have locked in our heads that marketers rely on. We keep our thought on what we have learned about a product or service and this is what we use in situations where a purchase decision must be made. During the buyer decision process this internal memory is combined with external memory to allow different brands to be indentified and evaluated. We will use our memory to look back on our previos thoughts and experiences so, when it comes to Kotler's buying process, if we have previously been satisfied by a product then the information search won't have to take place again whereas if past experience tells us that we were not satisfied with the product then an alternative brand may then be chosen.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is described as "a bitter- sweet emotion, where the past is viewed with both sadness and longing" (Soloman 2008). In relation to marketing, advertisers stir up memories from youth with the hope that those feelings they are cungering up will relate to what they are selling today. Sometimes a stimulus is able to bring about a more weakened response- spontaneous recovery which explains why we have strong feelings when we see or hear things that we havn't for so long. This links in with the 5 senses- Music, Images, Smells, Touch and Taste can all evoke memories of the past. Here are some adverts using nostalgia: