Explain how business markets differ from consumer

 Explain how business markets differ from consumer markets.
 Identify the main factors that influence business buyer behavior.
 List and define the steps in the business buying decision process.
 Explain how institutional and government buyers make their buying decisions.
3.1 Consumer Buying Behavior
Introduction
Models of Consumer Behavior in earlier times, marketers could understand consumers well
through the daily experience of selling to them. But as firms and markets have grown in size,
many marketing decision makers have lost direct contact with their customers and must now turn
to consumer research. They spend more money than ever to study consumers, trying to learn
more about consumer behavior. Who buys? How do they buy? When do they buy? Where do
they buy? Why do they buy?
The central question for marketers is; how do consumers respond to various marketing stimuli
that the company might use? The company that really understands how consumers will respond
to different product features, prices and advertising appeals has a great advantage over its
competitors. Therefore, companies and academies have researched heavily the relationship
between marketing stimuli and consumer response. Their starting point is the stimulus- response
model of buyer behavior shown in Figure 3.1. This shows that marketing and other stimuli enter
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the consumer's 'black box and produce certain responses. Marketers must figure out what is in
the buyer's black box. Marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place and
promotion. Other stimuli include significant forces and events in the buyer's environment;
economic, technological, political and cultural. All these stimuli enter the buyer's black box,
where they are turned into a set of observable buyer responses (shown on the right-hand side of
Figure 3.1): product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing and purchase amount.
The marketer wants to understand how the stimuli are changed into responses inside the
consumer's black box, which has two parts.
First, the buyer's characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli.
Second, the buyer's decision process itself affects the buyer's behavior. This chapter first looks at
buyer characteristics as they affect buying behavior, and then examines the buyer decision
process. We will never know what exactly is in the black box or be able perfectly to predict
consumer behavior, but the models can help us understand consumers, help us to ask the right
questions, and teach us how to influence them.
3.1.1. Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behavior
Consumer purchases are influenced strongly by cultural, social, personal and psychological
characteristics, as shown in Figure 3.2. For the most part, marketers cannot control such factors,
but they must take them into account.