Understanding Consumer Decision-Making Processes

Consumer Decision-Making and Beyond

Levels of Consumer Decision-Making

There are three primary levels of consumer decision-making:

• Extensive Problem-Solving: Consumers have not established criteria for evaluating a product category or specific brands.
• Limited Problem-Solving: Consumers already have established the basic criteria for evaluating the product category and the various brands in the category.
• Routinized Response Behavior: Consumers have experience with the product category and a well-established set of criteria with which to evaluate the brands they are considering.

Models of Consumers: Four Views of Decision-Making

• An Economic View
• A Passive View
• A Cognitive View
• An Emotional View

All depict consumers and their decision-making processes in distinctly different ways.

A Model of Consumer Decision-Making

Process

This component of the model is concerned with how consumers make decisions.

The act of making a consumer decision consists of three stages:

• Need Recognition: Identifying a "problem" or need.
• Prepurchase Search: Seeking something that can satisfy the problem or need.
• Evaluation of Alternatives: Evaluating potential options (customers use two types of information: brands or criteria).

Taken as a whole, the psychological field influences the consumer.

Consumer Decision Rules

Often referred to as heuristics, decision strategies, and information processing strategies, these are procedures used by consumers to facilitate brand (or other consumption-related) choices.

Purchase Behavior

There are three types of purchases:

• Trial purchases
• Repeat purchases
• Long-term commitment purchases

Postpurchase Evaluation

As consumers use a product, particularly during a trial purchase, they evaluate its performance in light of their own expectations. There are three possible outcomes of these evaluations:

1. Actual performance matches expectations, leading to a neutral feeling.
2. Performance exceeds expectations, causing what is known as positive disconfirmation of expectations.
3. Performance is below expectations, causing negative disconfirmation of expectations and dissatisfaction.

Both prepurchase and postpurchase evaluations feed back in the form of experience into the consumer's psychological field and serve to influence future decision processing.

Consumer Gifting Behavior

Gifting is an important part of consumer behavior. Various gift-giving and gift-receiving relationships are captured by the following five specific categories in the gifting classification scheme:

• Intergroup Gifting: A group gives a gift to another group.
• Intercategory Gifting: An individual gives a gift to a group or vice versa.
• Intragroup Gifting: A group gives a gift to itself or its members.
• Interpersonal Gifting: An individual gives a gift to another individual.
• Intrapersonal Gifting: A self-gift.