Cereal Aisle Analysis
Assignment 1

Richelle Gibson
Charla Session-Reed
MKT305 Consumer Behavior
03FEB2012

Identify the store and the day and time you made your observation.
In order for me to observe consumer behaviors, I went to my local grocery store Giant. Giant is a popular chain grocery store in my area and where I do all my grocery shopping. The two aisles I choose was the: Cereal Aisle and bread Aisle in order to see how consumer behavior varies for different products. In addition, realizing that consumers may behave differently depending on time of the day it is, I visited the store twice, once in the middle of week (around 2pm when there are not many shoppers there) and (around 5-6pm when the store is usually packed) with people getting off work and making a stop at the grocery store.
Analyze the behaviors you observed to determine how consumers progressed through the consumer behavior process while in different aisles.
I observed 5 consumers in total, consumer A-B-C in the cereal aisle and consumer D and E in the Bread aisle. The details are listed in the Appendix. When making a purchase decision, a consumer goes through a process which is often composed of stages: recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. In this experiment, consumers recognized that they have the need to buy cereal or bread food goods. At the store, these consumers faced many options, especially for cereals. I have always been overwhelmed by how many types of cereals that the local grocery store carries. These consumers made their purchase decision based on price, value and familiarity with the product. After making their decision, these consumers showed different post-purchase behavior. Some of them picked the product and quickly left the aisle and others stayed in the aisle checking other alternatives even