Consumer Behaviour — Take it with more than a pinch of salt
Consumer behaviour has always been more than a marketing buzzword- it is a strategic need for businesses to flourish. Be it a big brand or a startup, understanding your consumer’s behavior and tracking their buying patterns is essential in the product placement lifecycle to ensure a firm presence in the market. After all, it is the consumer who decides your brands’ worth.
It is essential to know the difference between your buyers at the very beginning before you conduct market research, product planning and even set up sales targets. Your buyer could be highly motivated (one who is in need, willing and able to make the purchase) or a serious buyer (one who is interested but not in a hurry to make the purchase) or a bargain buyer (one who is looking to negotiate and go through many options before making the purchase) or a casual looker/ window shopper (one who is not necessarily looking to make a purchase but is definitely invested in doing market study of the product/ service of their interest). By understanding your buyer type, you will be able to make the right emotional connect with them. Research shows that 95% of the buying decisions are made by the emotional part of the brain while only 5% attributes to the rational or functional part.
Many renowned brands invest heavily in emotional branding. A merchandise brand like Raymonds consciously kept itself away from the usual cloth marketing gimmicks that appeal the urban fashion-crazy crowd and went ahead with various emotional messaging campaigns- be it the one with son returning from a foreign country and not forgetting to touch his father’s feet or the recent one where dad stays home to take care of a newborn so that mom can return to work.
Consumer behaviour is also about understanding and catering to end-user’s comfort. An established brand like Pepsico went ahead and changed its entire line of automated machinery just to reduce the size of their famous Lays chips because they found that the earlier size was causing slight discomfort while eating!
This shows that if renowned brands invest and make drastic changes to suit consumer behaviour, startups and emerging brands could make a better strategy too if they invest in understanding the buying patterns of consumers.
