The Psychology of Consumer Behaviour

The Psychology of Consumer Behaviour

Which mode of shopping do you like? Is it online or offline? Every person has their own choice to purchase their products. Whether it is low-cost products or expensive products or whether it’s online or offline, we always prefer to buy the best products by comparing the prices with each other. Understanding how and when the consumer buys the products and the services they do. In a simpler form consumer psychology is speciality psychology where it focuses on how the consumer relates to the product that they want to buy.

What is consumer psychology?

Let us know details about consumer psychology and what it deals with. Consumer psychology is the characteristic of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and perceptions that influence how we buy and relate goods and services.

For example: if a person wants to buy a product from an online platform, once the person searches for the product on the online platform, he will be getting different options. He started relating the product with reviews and prices when the consumer felt satisfied with the product then he proceeded to buy it. Here consumer psychology works when the products are related to what the person wants to buy.

Read: The psychology of luxury Consumerism

Consumer behaviour definition

Consumer Behaviour encompasses mental and physical activities that the consumer engages in while searching, evaluating, purchasing and using the product and services. In the marketplace, consumer exchange their resources including money, taxes, time and efforts for value.

Characteristics of consumer behaviour

• Motivation
• Perception
• Believes
• Attitudes

Factor affecting consumer behaviour

• Personal factor: Each person has different choices and even the economic influence and behaviour change the behaviour of the consumer.
• Social factor: Most people follow the cultural and family factors where they follow the choices according to their family choices
• Psychological Factors: Psychological factors are the crucial factors shaping consumer behaviour. Key Psychological factors that affect the consumer are motivation, perception, learning and beliefs.

What is the role of consumer psychologists?

Buying the best product is an art. It creates a unique speciality of consumer psychology. Let us know more about what are the approaches implemented. According to the Society for Consumer Psychology Division 23 of the American Psychology Association, consumer psychology, “employs theoretical psychology approaches to understanding the consumer”.

Read: Understanding the Excessive Craze of online Shopping

This field is often considered a subspeciality of Industrial-Organizational Psychology and it is also known as the Psychology of Consumer or the Psychology of Marketing. Let’s learn more about what is the role of consumer psychologists in this field.

• How the consumer chooses the products.
• Their thought process and emotion behind their decision.
• How the environmental variables such as media, family, friends and culture influence their buying decisions.
• What influences you to choose the product over others?
• How personal factors and individual differences affect buying choices.
• What are the effective efforts to be taken to reach the consumers?

Duties of Consumer Psychologist

What exactly are the duties of a consumer psychologist? These professionals play an important role in not only supporting businesses to understand what they need but also they help the seller to promote and advertise their products.

Psychologists conduct marketing research

In this field, the first step is to understand the consumers, so that consumer psychologists can develop the products and plan a marketing campaign accordingly so that it helps to attract their target audience. Psychologists always focus on learning more about marketing techniques and dealing with what makes shoppers tick. This often helps to figure out the first target audience for a particular product including gender, age and socio-economic status of particular shoppers.

Creating marketing Messages

Though marketing helps to promote the products but its more to promote in social media. Marketing on social media platforms has been very helpful in targeting the desired consumers. When the messages are shared with a group or an individual helps to know the individual needs and choices of the consumer. investigation is done on consumer attitudes and behaviour. Consumer psychologists often investigate buyer behaviour. Here are some of the research methods that help to conduct the research the experimental method, phone surveys, focus groups and questionnaires. When the survey is conducted the buyer may ask about their previous shopping experience to understand individual differences and know the effect of the socio-economic status.

During the survey, the consumer psychologists are allowed to record personal details like name, gender, students, working professionals, age, and socio-economic status of the buyer so that they can differentiate according to the age group or status. For example – these surveys help to discover that working women aged between 28 and 35. whose income is 500000 – 600000, are most likely to buy a particular product or service knowing this will be helpful to begin the marketing to the desired audience.

Influence of Consumer Psychologists

Consumer psychologists may also encourage individuals to adopt an eco-friendly life that wouldn’t be normal. For example, asking the person to switch his lifestyle to a sustaining lifestyle is a trending topic in the consumer psychology world. Consumer psychology can be a powerful tool to measure current or likely consumer behaviour. Which helps the professions to plan accordingly.

Understanding each consumer’s mentality makes a difference. When every consumer is given a choice to choose their product, consumers try to compare the product which they want to buy. Consumers always like to prefer the best to use. Consumer psychologists also help the consumer to make the best choice.