Consumer behavior studies how consumers plan to acquire, choose, consume, and dispose of services and products. This includes customers’ responses, including mental, emotional, and behavioral. For example, your customer wakes up every day, and in this process, they make a progression of decisions. Then they usually have breakfast. What are they thinking? Some drive or commute to work while others stay home, especially after the COVID-19 world. Then, they make work choices and spend a large portion of their day doing this. Finally, your customer arrives home, and the last part of their day begins.
Consumer behavior and marketing
Although a large part of marketing is business-related, it also involves a psychological aspect. To provide value and fulfill customers’ needs, you need the marketing function in a business. Therefore, a complete marketing plan also considers psychology because you need to know how individuals think, process, and decide within a particular environment. Consumer behavior includes but is not limited to concepts taken from economics, sociology, biology, psychology, anthropology, and chemistry. To understand a human practically means understanding different theories from different angles and, more importantly, applying these theories to a business or a project.
Consumer’s attention
Today, you’ll hear about the attention economy. This relatively new approach to information and management labels individuals’ attention as scarce. This is a way of solving many information management problems. However, from a marketing point of view, it treats attention as a scarce resource. Attention is the first element in the AIDA framework (attention, interest, desire, and action), a classic in advertising. When you run a campaign, you need to get your customer’s attention because it is the starting point to begin a relationship with them.
A key aspect of marketing
With a point of view shift from production and sales to marketing, businesses are practically turned upside down from what used to be an industrial way of doing things. Today, many successful companies take consumer behavior as a starting point to operate. Having a customer-centric view means they don’t produce only what they can, but it means making products and services people want. This constant focus on the consumer is at the heart of creating lasting value. Today, there is usually more than one touchpoint when a future customer chooses your products and services or the ones you recommend.
Digital impacts your life.
When it comes to blogging, you move through a digital space. It is crucial to understand how digital impacts not only your life but also the life of your customers. First, it is essential to know that the digital forces in society have been disruptive. This means that we are constantly changing how we all consume and shop. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Netflix have redefined entire industries, and many consumers don’t even remember how the world was before they took dominance. With the internet, people are in control, and every day, they grow more empowered.
The rise of the global citizen
As we speak, digital consumers are finding the world is getting smaller. This means that many of the same experiences you find in one country, you’ll also find in others. This hasn’t always been the case, no matter how similar experiences were in the past. There’s also one opposite trend: people are finding their tribes in global internet culture and niche communities. These physical and virtual spaces for gathering are sometimes dictated by where people live, and more frequently, they are dictated by personal interests.
User personas are helpful.
What are user personas? First, I’ll start the definition by saying what user personas are not. Instead, they are not generalizations. That being said, they are a tool that represents a large set of archetypical users through features, interests, and goals. User personas are essential when you try to understand your customer’s point of view, and since they are based on factual information, they should take precedence over hunches and assumptions. You can find the information you’ll need to create personas offline, but gathering knowledge through primary and secondary sources is increasingly common.
Motivation is a big player.
You’ll often find that many business gurus use a cookie-cutter approach to managing businesses. The truth is that no two markets are alike. This means analyzing what motivates your audience. On the one hand, you’ll find extrinsic motivators; on the other, you’ll discover extrinsic motivators. The first is about incentives, rewards, pressure, or threats, and the second is more lasting and includes enjoyment, fun, love, self-expression, achievement, and negative intrinsic motivators. You’ll find that a unique blend of these two types of motivators is precisely what you need to make your results soar.
Biases
Like with a partner, you’ll realize there is always more to learn about your audience. This doesn’t mean you can’t try to get as much actionable information as possible. You should be aware of cognitive biases in every human being and that your offers shouldn’t be on the wrong side of the fence. These biases are often our preferences, and why not? Our prejudices. Awareness of these biases is the first step to sharpening your thinking process. By understanding them, you can lead your customer through the path of least resistance. Finally, this means you’ll be more empathetic, and your customers will be happy to buy from you again and again.
A constant reevaluation
The more you understand your customer, the more you can fulfill their needs and the happier they will be with their purchases. You should be aware that the market is constantly changing, and by considering the external and internal forces related to your audience, you can analyze if your market is evergreen; that is, there is always demand for your offers. Perhaps if the purchase history of your target audience is seasonal, that could be a strong indicator that they will follow the pattern. Are you selling business to business or business to consumer? The more you understand your customer, the better your business will be.
