Understanding customer behavior: how do people buy?

We learned a factor that affects customers' buying behavior: why customers buy, and know the reasons behind customers' behavior, which is the ultimate goal of behavior.

But from the goal to the final completion of the purchase, this involves the decision-making process of the customer's purchase, that is, how the customer buys. This factor affects the final behavior of customers together with the reasons why customers buy.

Therefore, in order to fully understand customer behavior and better analyze strategic marketing, we need to continue to discuss another factor that affects customer buying behavior: how do people buy?

You have to make all kinds of purchasing decisions every day, from helping enterprises buy machinery and equipment to eating and drinking water. What have you done to choose your favorite products?

You can think of people's buying as a decision-making process. Generally speaking, this decision-making process has five stages: problem confirmation, information search, alternative evaluation, decision-making stage and evaluation stage.

Give an example to let you know the decision-making process.

First of all, the problem is that consumers are aware of their needs. For example, at night it is 1 1, and you feel a little hungry, which means you realize that you need to eat something. This is the problem confirmation stage.

Next, you enter the information search stage. In order to meet the demand, consumers search for products that can meet their own needs from various sources.

Look around and see what you can eat. You find a cake in the refrigerator, a box of chocolates in the drawer, and an apple you ate at noon in the kitchen.

Then enter the evaluation stage of substitutes, and collect so much product information, consumers will compare these products, form the criteria for selecting products according to these information, and form the purchase intention.

Your request for food is fresh, and you think apples have been left too long, so you have to choose between cake and chocolate.

Entering the decision-making stage, consumers make decisions. Finally, you decide to eat chocolate.

After eating chocolate, you find that you are still hungry. You enter the post-purchase evaluation stage and regret it. I wish I had eaten the cake.

Knowing the process of customer purchase, marketers can find and seize opportunities in all aspects of decision-making and formulate corresponding marketing strategies, so that customers are more likely to buy their own products.

If you are not a marketer, understanding this decision-making process can help you reduce the chances of making mistakes as a consumer.

In this lesson, I will take you through five stages of customer purchase decision: problem confirmation, information search, alternative evaluation, decision-making stage and evaluation stage, so as to find out what actions marketers can take in customer decision-making process and promote customer decision-making.

The first stage is called problem confirmation. That is, when customers find that there is a gap between their current state and their ideal state, "problems" will appear. At this time, customers will look for products that solve problems and meet their own needs.

For marketers, how to grasp the current marketing opportunities? Marketers can do three things:

For example, it is easy to identify a person's hunger and thirst, but we don't really know when he will be hungry and thirsty. Scene mining is related to how marketing should happen at the right time and remind people of their desire for products.

This picture shows Colgate's marketing activities in some countries in Southeast Asia. The little girl is eating ice cream with Xue Lu. After eating, she found that the ice cream stick in her hand slowly showed a complete appearance, a bit like a toothbrush, with Colgate on it, and a sentence: Don't forget Colgate. It means that Colgate can help you solve the problem of clean and healthy mouth after eating ice cream!

First of all, Colgate keenly captures the oral problems that may occur after people eat ice cream, and understands the problems to meet people's cleaning and health needs. Then the scene where this problem occurs is often when people have just finished eating ice cream and have not moved on to the next thing.

So Colgate showed up at the right time, seized this opportunity and told people that you had a problem at the first time. Don't forget that I am your solution.

Then when people confirm the problem, they will consider the value of the product they may want to buy, that is, whether it can meet their own needs or even exceed their expectations, thus helping them decide whether it is worth buying this product.

Entering the information search stage, where can customers find information? And how do customers perceive value when looking for information, so as to judge which products meet their expectations?

First of all, we should understand that customers' information sources usually come from business information, personal information, experience information and public information, and according to research, personal information has the greatest influence on people.

So how do customers perceive the information and value conveyed by products? In fact, people's value perception of products will increase with the passage of time, that is, the value perception after purchase will be greater than that before purchase.

Here we divide the product attributes into search attributes, experience attributes and confidence attributes according to the time nodes of people's perception of information.

At this stage, marketers should constantly improve customers' value perception of their products in the collected information, try to improve their value perception of products before buying, and rely more on the search attributes of products, thus improving the possibility of customers choosing their own products.

Then I will show you the cognitive characteristics of customers and the actions that marketers can take at this stage from two aspects: information source and customer's value perception.

We can divide the information that customers can collect into the following four categories: business information; Personal information; Empirical information and public information.

The first kind of public information is called third-party comment, which is an objective and fair evaluation of products and services by professional institutions or professionals. For example, the Consumer Report magazine in the United States will evaluate various products in each issue, such as the washing degree of washing machines and the safety test of automobiles.

Another kind of public information is called consumer comments. For example, Dianping.com and yelp.com in the United States comment on restaurants and other service facilities on Yelp, and these comments come from ordinary consumers.

You can recall, which information source do you trust more when you collect information in consumption? Different information sources of different products may have different effects on you.

For example, if you buy a car, it is a complex, expensive and low-frequency product that you don't understand. You may believe in professional evaluation, that is, third-party comments in public information; And eating a meal, a cheap and high-frequency product, you may be more willing to accept the recommendation of your friends, that is, personal information.

You might say that everyone is different, yes.

Here is a statistical data from the United States, which shows what information sources American consumers will use before buying from 2004 to 20 16. The length of the column in the picture represents the overall influence of various information sources on people's purchase.

Personal information has the greatest influence, followed by consumer comments in public information. The third is all kinds of business information.

Then the customer searches for information. If the marketer can make the customer feel that the value finally obtained from the product is greater than or equal to the price to be paid, then the possibility of people buying the product will be greatly increased.

Now that you know the main sources of people's search information, how can you enhance customers' perception of product value?

In fact, people's perception of product value is not completed at one time, but will happen at different time nodes, such as courses outside your circle. You don't know its value until you know that the value perception is 0. After that, you learned about the curriculum structure and system outside the circle through articles and friends' introductions, and you began to understand the value of the curriculum. At this time, your value perception has increased, and further, with the purchase of courses to complete the course, the value perception brought by the course will be further enhanced.

We can use a simple model to show the dynamic change process of people's value perception. The horizontal axis represents time, and the intersection of the time axis and the dotted line represents the time when we buy products.

The length of the line below represents the price we paid for the product. Triangle represents the change of people's value perception in different periods, and has experienced a complete change from left to right.

At the moment of purchase, people's perceived value is still not much, so many times the perceived value people buy is not as high as the value they pay, which is a huge challenge for many marketers, because only when people have experience in buying products can they fully perceive the value of a product.

In order to increase customers' value perception as much as possible, marketers need to adopt different strategies at different time points; On the other hand, the customer's perception point is advanced, which makes the customer believe that the value of the product is greater than the payment price when purchasing.

Because people will buy a product, because people believe that the value they will eventually get from the product will be greater than or equal to the price paid.

The last red line segment represents the value that customers will eventually perceive from the product. The red line segment must be greater than or equal to the purple line segment before people will buy the product.

So how can we convince customers that products will bring greater value when they are purchased? Then you have to know what value users perceive before and after buying.

Therefore, according to the customer's perception time of product value, before use, after use and after use, we can divide product attributes into three categories, namely, search attributes, experience attributes and confidence attributes.

Distinguishing the search attribute, experience attribute and confidence attribute of a product is based on when each product attribute is perceived.

Knowing the different attributes of products, we can design marketing strategies according to the characteristics of products. If most of the value of an enterprise is created by search attributes, then the marketing work is very simple, because people can confirm the value of products before buying.

However, if a large part of the value of your product is created by the attributes of experience and confidence, it will bring great challenges to customers' perception, so you need to use some strategies and designs to accelerate people's perception of product value as much as possible and promote sales. Let's take a closer look at various attributes.

For example, the brand name, course theme, course frequency and study duration of the out-of-circle course you bought are all identifiable values before you buy it.

What can enterprises do to present it to potential customers as soon as possible and increase customers' perception of product value?

Enterprises can vividly show customers the information that is beneficial to increase customer value perception through advertising, publicity and other channels that customers are willing to contact. For example, many slogans in front of the store and eye-catching banners in the store all play this role.

# # # # # The second attribute is the experience attribute, that is, customers must fully perceive the value during use.

Then the attribute of out-of-circle experience is obviously the quality of teaching. Only after class can we feel the quality of teaching.

How can enterprises make people believe in the value brought by experience attributes before buying? In fact, the courses are similar to the free reconstruction opportunities of warranty system, return and recall system of automobile enterprises, and online courses can also provide audition services, which can increase customers' perception of value before buying.

The value that can be perceived later will be perceived earlier, making customers more willing to pay for the value.

The attribute of confidence outside the circle is that you believe that this course will help you do better in your future career development. This part of the value you really want must be the value you still can't confirm after going through the course.

How can people confirm that this value can satisfy the confidence attribute? The first depends on the brand's reputation. If the reputation of this brand is getting stronger and stronger outside the circle, even if people have not confirmed the value of the course, the reputation of this brand will make you believe enough.

You can also find some graduates to communicate with those who will study the course, and use their experiences to prove the value of the course.

For three types of different attributes, enterprises can try to move the value experience of different attributes forward as far as possible, thus increasing customers' value perception before buying, and then being more willing to pay for the products.

At the end of the information search stage, customers selected a number of products for their evaluation and selection according to the perceived value and product price.

After that, people entered the stage of alternative evaluation, and marketing always emphasized value. Then people choose the best value among different substitute products. Considering the quality of the products I can get and the price I have to pay, people will definitely choose the product with the highest value in the end.

Value, like your height and weight in traditional economics, is a measurable physical quantity. However, from the perspective of marketing, there is a "theory of relativity" of value perception, that is, the value of each product does not exist in isolation and cannot be measured. How much value a product can perceive in a specific scenario depends on our comparison of products. So in order to better highlight the value of products, marketing

People often need to set up a contrast scene to help customers make choices.

Here I want to introduce you to a model of bait effect. There are two products AB in the picture on the left. We present it through two dimensions, namely, attribute one: quality and attribute two: cost performance.

So what kind of products have advantages? Obviously, in the quadrant, the higher the quality, the higher the cost performance, so the product in the upper right corner is always better than the product in the lower left corner. Therefore, enterprises must create more value for customers if they want to gain competitive advantage. You should try to move your product from the lower left corner to the upper right corner.

The quality of product A is good, but the price is not worthwhile; The quality of option B is slightly worse, but the price is cost-effective. If you have to choose between A and B in the diagram 1, you may want to think about it.

Let's look at the picture on the right again. A and B are the same, but there is an -A in the lower left corner of A. You know that A is definitely better than -A, which makes it easier, so -A is very useful. It is because of its existence that people will find that A has a comparative advantage in the comparison of A, B and -A, and eventually more people will choose A, which is also the bait effect.

People not only tend to compare products, but also tend to pay attention to products that are easy to compare. Many times, it is difficult for people to evaluate products independently, so marketers should be good at designing bait and putting a product in a specific scene. People have the opportunity to compare the relative advantages of products before they can say what they really want. As a customer, you can also find out whether there is bait in your choice. Is your final choice what you want most or is it influenced by bait?

In its annual magazine subscription list, there are two options: one option is to subscribe to the electronic version for $59 a year, and the other option is to add the paper version and the electronic version for $0/25 a year. This is the choice of low quality and low price and high quality and high price respectively. Obviously, magazines expect people to choose the second option to make enterprises more profitable. So if you were a consumer, which one would you choose to subscribe to?

Let's look at the subscription form below, and there is a second option (middle option), that is, subscribe to the printed version of 125 USD. At this time, think about which one you will choose to subscribe to.

Let's look at an actual experiment. A professor selected two groups 100 MBA students from Si Long School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology to participate in the experiment.

Under two experimental conditions, 68% of people in the first subscription form chose the electronic version of 59 yuan; When the subscription form becomes three options, the number of people who choose 59 electronic version becomes 16%, and the number of people who choose electronic version plus printed version rises to 84%.

Obviously, the temptation of $65,438+025 in printed matter helps people to make value judgments and choices faster.

If you want to use 59 yuan to promote the sales of electronic edition, you can further think about how to achieve this goal.

There are two things you can do to make your products more competitive in sales. First of all, you should understand the real needs of customers, design your products well and create real value. This is your basic skill.

Even if your product has a strong value advantage, you should do the second thing, to create an environment for your product, in which your product has a relative advantage, that is, to create an-A.

People will enter the fourth stage-making decisions after comparing various alternative products. This is also the last link in the purchase. The customer has evaluated the value of the product, and the next step is to determine the purchase link.

If enterprises understand the characteristics of people's decision-making in the decision-making stage, they can design more pertinently and promote people's decision-making

But in many cases, when consumers or enterprises make purchases, the decision is not made by a single person, but by multiple departments or individuals, playing different roles and making a purchase decision together.

Here is a conceptual model: DMU.

There are five typical roles. Initiators, influencers, decision makers, actual buyers and users.

In fact, in addition to living, organizing purchases, such as a company buying a set of financial management software, also has many functions to play.

In addition to the common five roles, there is also a gatekeeper role. That is, if the character does not agree to purchase, then the purchase action cannot be executed.

For example, the company's compliance department can't purchase as long as it doesn't agree; In daily life, a boy wants to marry a girl. At this time, my mother-in-law said that if you don't have a house, I won't let my daughter marry you, so at this time, my mother-in-law became the gatekeeper.

Faced with different products, the five roles are often played by different people and involve different needs. Marketers should sort out what DMUs there are, know who they are, the core problems and urgent needs of each of them, and know through which channels each of them searches for information. In this case, we will design the marketing strategy according to the problems he cares about and the channels to obtain information.

On the other hand, DMU is often interrelated, which will also create some new marketing opportunities for us.

Mushroom Street is a fashionable e-commerce platform, and more than 90% of its users are young women after the Ninth Five-Year Plan.

Another brand is Blue Ocean House, which is a retail brand of men's wear mainly in physical stores.

The target customers of Mushroom Street and Blue Ocean House are completely different, but in recent years, Blue Ocean House and Mushroom Street have done a lot of cooperation. Here's an example: Blue Ocean House used Mushroom Street to establish a clever connection between men's wear users and buyers, and influenced their girlfriends or wives to promote men's wear sales.

There is a live channel on Mushroom Street, and some female anchors called "Queen with Goods" will be invited to broadcast live products that women care about on Mushroom Street. In this cooperation, Mushroom Street asked the anchor to invite male friends to show what they look like after wearing Shanghai blue clothes and guide them quickly. In an anchor session, a flagship T-shirt of Blue Ocean House received more than 3,000 orders in less than two hours.

At the same time, the detective team of Mushroom Street will match the dressed suits in the Blue Ocean House, try them on, and then teach other little girls how to dress up their boyfriends through live broadcast.

In cooperation, they also chose some specific industries, such as car drivers. They are all young men who wear uniform formal clothes at work, but if they are transformed into formal clothes, their image and personal characteristics will be greatly improved. In the amateur transformation in the event, they started with the driver on the Cao Cao special car APP and completed the transformation through the costume master of Mushroom Street, completely subverting our stereotype of the special car driver. The slogan of this activity is no ugly husband, only lazy girlfriend. Now you know what the whole activity has to do with DMU.

These boys are men's wear users, but their wives and girlfriends can play important roles in DMU, such as initiators, influencers, decision makers or buyers.

Therefore, through this approach, Blue Ocean House incited different roles in DMU, linked male users with female DMU roles, and promoted sales.

For another example, taxi software such as Didi taxi is very common in our lives, but the elderly also need to go out. What if they can't use this application?

The old version of Didi taxi allows parents to call a car with one click. As shown on the right, children can help their parents take a taxi by operation. Parents are actual users, and these young children help their parents to complete the purchase. They become decision makers, buyers or influencers. This way is very similar to the previous example, and it has further expanded our market and increased our business.

The last stage is often neglected by us, which is called post-purchase evaluation. Many enterprises think that their products are sold out. What is the impact of customers' feelings and evaluations?

But there is a phenomenon that often appears after purchase, which is called cognitive dissonance. Customers will worry about the shortcomings of the selected brand, but they will also be uneasy about not getting the benefits of the brand they didn't buy.

In the post-purchase evaluation stage, consumers will compare their expectations with the actual post-purchase experience to determine their satisfaction with the products and post-purchase activities.

This degree of satisfaction will not only affect consumers' attitude towards the product, but also provide information for whether they will buy it again in the future, and will also affect other consumers' attitudes towards the product.

Therefore, enterprises need to help customers prove the rationality of their purchase before buying, help customers solve cognitive dissonance before buying, better understand customers and eliminate customers' doubts and confusion.

For example, if you buy a new mobile phone, then you will also go to see the mobile phone you bought before. What's the current price? How would you feel if you found that the price of this mobile phone was reduced by 10% every week?

You will feel that you have lost money and it is not worthwhile to buy this mobile phone. This is what we agreed. You experienced cognitive dissonance.

If a customer has cognitive dissonance and finds that the price of the mobile phone he just bought has dropped rapidly, do you think he will buy this brand again next time?

On the other hand, if a person has never experienced cognitive dissonance and the price is still rising after buying this mobile phone, then he is likely to buy the same mobile phone next time. Therefore, many enterprises should consider how to deal with the cognitive dissonance that may occur after customers buy.

For those functional and practical purchases and consumption, customers are less likely to have cognitive dissonance, while for those who emphasize enjoyment, people are more likely to have cognitive dissonance.

Therefore, one thing an enterprise should do is to help customers prove that their purchases are justified, so that they can think that their purchases are right, there will be no problems, and of course they will not regret it.

De Beers, the largest diamond dealer in the world, is a typical example. Diamonds are too expensive. How to make customers buy diamonds without regret, guilt and out of tune?

Therefore, De Beers has been shouting a slogan for decades: Diamonds last forever, and one lasts forever.

In this way, although a person spends a lot of money, he can buy it justifiably, and say, although such a small stone can be used for a lifetime. Isn't it right for me to buy something eternal?

There is also a slogan in this company: You can buy eternal things with only two months' salary. Isn't that a small price to pay?

So before you buy this diamond, De Beers has helped you resolve your cognitive dissonance, so people will buy it happily, and then more people will buy it through word of mouth.

In the era of digital marketing, in many cases, enterprises can resolve people's cognitive dissonance in advance, and through media publicity, they can clear their names in the information search stage.

For example, because of public opinion and high prices, many people are easily out of tune, and it is difficult to convince themselves to make such a purchase. Therefore, those who are engaged in medical and aesthetic services should think about how to resolve people's cognitive dissonance and justify people's purchases in advance.

For example, it emphasizes the one-time cost-effectiveness and the high efficiency brought by its lasting effect, which makes people more acceptable.

Knowing the two major factors of customer behavior, why and how to buy, I want to sum it up in two sentences: The first sentence comes from peter drucker, who said that what customers really buy is never what you think you are selling, so this sentence tells us to understand why customers buy and what customers want to buy.

The second sentence is that if you want to succeed and increase your business and income, you must match the way you market your products with the way your potential customers know and buy your products. What is reflected here is such a basic idea of how people buy.

1. In order to understand and analyze how customers buy, we can analyze it through a process model. It includes the following main links: problem confirmation, information search, alternative evaluation, decision-making and post-purchase evaluation.

2. By understanding "Why do customers buy?" After knowing the real problem that the customer wants to solve, the exact scene of the problem should be determined in the "problem confirmation" stage, so as to lock the actual marketing opportunities.

3. In the information search stage, marketers should not only know the information channel sources of customers' preferences, but also design different marketing communication strategies according to the differences of value perception opportunities corresponding to search attributes, experience attributes and confidence attributes in products.

4. In the stage of alternative evaluation, consumers evaluate alternative products according to their value. Marketers should understand the "relativity" in value evaluation and design a situation with comparative advantages for their products accordingly.

5. In the decision-making stage, there may be various DMUs with different roles to play their respective roles. Marketers need to identify these decision-making units and explore possible marketing challenges and key business opportunities accordingly.

6. In the post-purchase evaluation stage of consumers, enterprises should foresee possible cognitive dissonance and provide information needed to help consumers achieve legitimacy, so as to ensure that repeated purchases have a prerequisite.

Through the last lesson and this lesson, you may have realized many differences between consumers, and a deep understanding of consumers will help us to better formulate marketing strategies.

Next, it introduces the marketing strategy decision based on customers, starting with the theme of STP marketing, that is, how to segment the market for different customers and choose the target market segment.

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