Family Decision Making.

Purchase behaviour is substantially determined by the nature of the family.

You may never have thought about it before but there are many different types of family:

Nuclear Family- father, mother and children who live together

Extended Family- nuclear family plus relatives such as grand parents, aunts, etc

Family of Orientation- the family you are born into

Family of Procreation- the family you marry into

There can be a number of changes to the family structure for example single parents as there is an increase in the number of births out of marriage, 1 out of every 7 families are one parent families. There is also an increase in step families so the nuclear family is being challenged by the 'horizontal' family of step children and step parents. 

The average household size is 2.4 people in 2001, however it has seen a dramatic increase in one person households from 12% in 1961 to 28% in 2001. Often within every household there are 2 main breadwinners and the employment rate of women is one of the highest in Europe and one quarter of married women work 30 hours plus.

A family's values needs are mostly affected by the number of children, their ages and whether one, two or more adults are employed outside of the family.

So who keeps track of the family bills? it is thought that in traditional families the man earns it, the women spends it…the way it should be right!?

However, unfortunately, in the modern family there is more shared participation. It is thought that newlyweds will share the decision of how the money is spent, and as time goes by one spouse or the other will take over these responsibilities. Cultural background will impact the dominance of husband or wife; husbands tend to be more dominant in decision making amongst couples with a strong Mediterranean ethnic identification. Even in northern Europe, the traditional pattern of ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles is still fairly strong. When it comes to men and women and decision-making, traditionally some buying decisions were made by one spouse. For instance men would choose the car, the telly and women would be in charge of decorative decisions, and things like holidays were made jointly. However of recent times there has been evidence of role change with men taking more of an interest in household affairs and woman making joint decisions on products such as cars.

Knowing who the decision maker is, is of high importance to the marketer because they need to know who they are to target and whether or not they are to target a single spouse or both. In some cases though they may be targeting the children however, as research shows that many family purchases other than toys are influenced by children. Children tend to be heavy TV viewers so are likely to be exposed to more ads than other groups and therefore influenced more.

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Take a look at this link: Wife is the decision maker while husband is an obedient follower. This gives an insight into what people really think about the decisions in the home and often backs up the theory mentioned above.