Psychological Factors influence on Customer

 

One or more motives within a person activate goal-oriented behaviour.
One such behaviour is perception, that is, the collection and processing of
information. Other important psychological activities that play a role in
buying decisions are learning,
attitude formation, personality and self-concept.

MOTIVATION — THE STARTING POINT

To understand why consumers behave as they do we must
first ask why a person acts at all. The answer is, “Because he or she
experiences a need. “All behaviour starts with a need. Security, social acceptance and prestige
are examples of needs. A need must be aroused or stimulated before it
becomes a motive.

Thus,
a motive is a need sufficiently stimulated to move an individual to seek
satisfaction. At one level buyers are quite willing to talk about their motives
for buying common everyday products. At a second level, they are aware of their reasons for buying but will not
admit them to others. Third level, where even the buyers cannot explain the
factors motivating their buying actions. Purchase is often the result of multiple motives.

Classification
Of Motives.

Motives can be
grouped into two broad categories:

Needs aroused from physiological
state of tension (such as the need for sleep)

Needs aroused from psychological state of tension (such as
the needs for affection and self-respect).

PERCEPTION

A motive is an aroused need, it in
turn, activates behavior intended to satisfy the aroused need. The process of receiving, organizing
and assigning meaning to information or stimuli steered by our five
senses is known as perception.

Perception plays a major
role in the stage of the buying, decision process where alternatives are
identified.

What we perceive-
the meaning we give something sensed, depends on the object and our experience. In an instant the mind is
capable of receiving information,
comparing it to a huge store of images in memory and providing an
interpretation. Perception occurs quickly and often with very little infor­mation
but it is a powerful factor in decision making. Scents for example, are
powerful behavior triggers.

Every day we come in
contact with an enormous number of marketing stimuli.

However the perceptual process is
selective in very specific ways. Consider that:

We pay attention by exception. That
is of all marketing stimuli our senses are exposed to, only those with
the power to capture and hold our attention have the potential of being
perceived. This phenomenon is called selective attention.

As part
of perception, new information is compared with a person’s existing store of knowledge,
or frame of reference. If an inconsistency is discovered the new information will be distorted to conform to
the established beliefs.

We retain only part of what we have
selectively perceived.

LEARNING

Learning is changes in behavior
resulting from observation and experience. According to stimulus response theory, learning occurs as a person (1)
responds to some stimulus by behaving in a particular way and (2) is rewarded
for a correct response or penalized for an incorrect one. When same
correct response is repeated in reaction to the same stimulus a behavior
pattern or learning is established.

Five factors
are fundamental to learning

• Drive: Internal or external forces
  that require person to respond in some way.
• Cues: Signals from the environment that determine the pattern of Response
• .Responses: Behavioral reactions to the drive
  and cues
• Reinforcement: Results when the response is
  rewarding. Reinforcement can be either positive or negative. Positive reinforcement involves
  experiencing a desirable outcome as a result of engaging in the
  behavior. Negative reinforcement
  occurs when a behavior allows a person to avoid an undesirable outcome.
• Punishment: A
  penalty inflicted for incorrect behavior.

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PERSONALITY

The study of human
personality has given rise to many, widely divergent, schools of psychological thought. In this discussion, personality is defined broadly as an individual’s
pattern of traits that influence behavioral response. We speak of people as
being self-confident, aggressive, shy, domineering, flexible, and / or friendly
and as being influenced (but not control ed) by these that personality
traits do influence in their responses to situations..

The Self-Concept. Your self- concept or self-image
is the way you see yourself. At
the same it is the picture you think other have of you. Studies of purchases show that general y prefer brands
and products that are compatible with their self-concept.

ATTITUDES

An attitude is
a learned predisposition to respond to an object or class of objects in a
consistently favourable or unfavourable way. Numerous studies have reported a relationship between
consumers’ attitudes and their buying behaviour regarding both products selected
and brands chosen. Surely, then it is in a marketer’s best interest to understand
how attitudes are formed, the functions they perform and how they can be
changed.

Al attitudes have the fol owing characteristics in common

( i )Attitudes are learned 

(ii)Attitudes have an object. By
definition we can hold attitude only toward something

(ii)attitudes
have direction and intensity: Our attitudes are either favourable or unfavourable toward the object.
They cannot be neutral. This factor is important

for marketers since both strongly
held favourable and strongly held unfavourable attitudes are difficult to change.

(iv) Final y attitudes tend to be
stable and generalizable. Once formed, attitudes usual y endure and the longer they are held, the
more resistance to change they become. It can be extremely difficult to change
strongly held attitudes. Consequently when the marketer is faced with negative
or unfavourable attitudes, there are two options:

Try to change the attitude to be compatible
with the product

Determine what the consumers; attitudes are and then change
the product to match those attitudes.