Introduction
Our group choose Ipad Mini as the product discussed in the assignment. Ipad Mini is the newly released Ipad of Apple Company which is very special in the Ipad category because it is the first Ipad of only 7.9 inches screen and of the lowest price in Ipad series. Many spectators in the industry regard Ipad Mini as a powerful hit which can greatly expand the potential tablet market (such as female market, lower-ended market) because its lower price and smaller size.

Ipad Mini is picked up as our topic not only because of its unique influence to the small-size tablet market and its strategic significance to Apple Company after the death of Steven Jobs, but also it falls into extended decision making progress, which involves a complete set of decision progress to discuss. Ipad Mini is relatively high in price compared with other small size tablets and it may greatly influence the entertainment aspect of owners’ life style, thus people would experience a complex progress of information searching, selection and evaluation before the purchase. This makes it high purchase involved and high product involved.

1.Define a target for your product. Explain, using relevant theory, the reasons for choosing this target market.

Our group chooses target market to people of the age of 21-45, with incomes of $75k-100k interested in gaming, e-reading and surfing on the Internet. The reason that we choose people aged 25 to 45 years old partly is that this age group fall within the Generation Y (born between 1977-1996), the majority consumers and early adopters on the services relating to the Internet ,and electronic products. Their enthusiasm and affordability on costly, newest high-technique products which other population is less likely to purchase make them a significant purchase power for gadgets like Ipad Mini.

Moreover, this age group covers the households experiencing the young singles, the newly-married, and the full nest 2 family stage, and all these three stages have a comparatively high probability to purchase Ipad Mini. The first two stages pay a lot on entertainment, because their children, the potentially largest financial burden, hasn't been given a birth yet, and their incomes are still increasing. And entertainment is exactly what Ipad Mini is used for. Regarding the full nest 2 family stage, the parents are likely to buy their Generation Z kids ipads if the household is financially abundant. Because of all the above reasons, individuals aged 21-45 is chosen for their probability to purchase the product. In fact, this can be persuasively illustrated by Figure 1.1.(Blog, 2010)

The reason for choosing people with incomes of $75k-100k is that, compared with other ipad categories, Ipad Mini is more attractive to this segmentation. With its lowest price among the ipad categories, Ipad Mini is powerfully attractive to potential consumers who can afford mini rather than other Ipads. As shown in Figure 1.2(Mine, March 7, 2012), other Ipads perform adequately well in the market with income above $100k.So it is Ipad Mini's role to attract the lower ended consumers--the individuals with incomes of $75k-100k.

Furthermore, the perfect combination of good function on entertainment and great convenience to carry it around make it choices for consumers that requires portable gadgets for gaming, movie watching, e-reading and surfing on the Internet.

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Figure 1.2 The left graph states the age distribution of customers who uses both Yahoo and Ipad, and the right graph lists the age index of Yahoo users and the U.S. average population.
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*iPad audience is based on mobile phone subscribers that own an iPad or iPad 2, does not include devices used for enterprise purposes, in retail locations, etc.

Figure1.2 Income profile of U.C Ipad and Ipad 2 owners (in thousands) in 2011

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Explain what type of decision-makers the target market would be. Justify your answer.
The target market of Ipad Mini is the type of extended decision maker as following aspects will be discussed about it.

Ipad Mini is the product belongs to tablet PC category, which has competitors such as Amazon Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7. When an idea to hold a tablet PC(problem recognition) comes to a consumer’s mind, she/he would get different choices to select, which in other word is that such problem recognition is generic.

It is obvious that the more number of alternatives available to solve a problem, the more external information search there will be. As an electronic product, Ipad Mini holds amounts of information needed to be gained from both internal and external. For our target market, even thought she/he may have such experience in using other Apple products, knowing certain information about the brand, she/he may also require other external information in the decision of purchasing Ipad Mini, because consumers may suffer its probable risk like financial risk as Ipad Mini is a newly created product in the market.

As an electronic product, Ipad Mini has many attributes like its size, screen resolution, system speed and so forth. Our target market may go through a thorough and careful evaluation on their evaluation criteria regarding these attributes in order to make a right decision. And besides, complex decision rules would be applied to the decision process. Consumers may use different rules to select brand and product among lots of alternatives.

After purchasing, consumer may come to post-purchase stage. Dissonance may be generated as the high uncertainty held by consumers after they buy an Ipad Mini and then to through a thorough complex evaluation upon it.

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3. Describe, using relevant theory, each step of the Decision-Making Process that the consumer would go through when purchasing this product.

As is stated in the above, Ipad is a both high purchase involved and product involved product, so it falls into the extended decision making. That means consumers would go through all the five steps in the decision making process.

In the first stage, problem recognition occurs after need arousal and problem recognition. Speaking of problem recognition, when the ideal state is enhanced, there are several probabilities that individuals want to buy an Ipad: (1) social class. (2) Reference groups. (3)financial status. Better financial status leads to higher expectation. (4) Motive. The ego need and self-actualisation in Maslow Hierarchy of Need Theory and the tension relief and self expression need in McGuire’s Psychological Motives can lead to a higher expectation for gadgets like Ipad Mini. As people age, their expectation and requirement towards entertainment may get higher, potentially leading to purchasing Ipad Mini. Regarding the need arousal, there are these relating elements: (1) Past decisions. (2) Natural depletion of existing products. (3) The instrumental or symbolic performance of the owned products is not satisfactory.

In the second stage, consumers search for information on the relevant brands for the future evaluation and selection. The information can be external or internal. When consumers select information in purpose of purchasing a electronic product like Ipad Mini, they may comes to these resources: (1) memories relating to these gadgets, (2) personal resources like friends and family who has knowledge or experience to the products.

In the third stage, evaluation and selection, consumers need to think over multiple relevant elements. Consumers who need to buy gadgets tend to use surrogate indicators of price and brand names. And their evaluative criteria can involves attributes like price level, exterior appearance, style, color and functional index like screen resolution and operating system (Android, Windows or IOS). The alternatives they considered are Amazon Kindle Fire , Google's Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy. Then they evaluate alternatives using criteria and applying decision rules. After going through these processes, customers get their selected alternatives, Ipad Mini.
In the fourth stage, store choice and purchase, consumers meet with a question: Should they choose brand or the retail outlet as the first element determining the purchase progress? If they choose brand as the dominant factor, they just need to go to Apple Store or other retail outlets. If the retail outlet is the first one to consider, customers would go to a retail outlet like Bestbuy, look through the wanted brands there and finally pick one to purchase. If the two factors are equally important, consumers may go to different stores and check various brands and products, evaluate all the factors relating to both stores and products, and finally determine what to buy and where to buy it.
In the final stage, post purchase process, there can be changes in consumer attitude and behavior towards the brand, depending on whether consumers are satisfied with the purchase after the usage and consumption of the product. According to the Expectancy Disconfirmation Model, when actual performance meets or exceeds the expectations, satisfaction arises. In this case, consumers are likely to turn into loyal customers and have repeated purchase.
On the contrary, if actual performance falls below expectations, dissatisfactions would occur and lead to post-purchase dissonance, brand shift, product disposal and explanations.
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4. What consumer behaviour issues would need to be considered when marketing this product? Justify your answer, using relevant theory.

An important process in consumer decision making is the information searching. Consumers especially for the extended makers, they tend to be more active in information searching as both internal and external information are needed in order to make a right decision. According to information processing, three main stages need our attentions. The first stage is exposure, which means consumers are surrounded by complex environment, we should identify which channels can expose our Ipad Mini to our right target market, like television programs, magazines, Apple department stores) . The second and fourth stages are attention and interpretation respectively, which happens when stimulus activates in mind and resulting into the brain for processing. We can enhance consumers operations by viewing our Apple outlets as information environments, and use both stimulus and personal-interest factors to attract attention like advertisements and packages.

Consumer motivations play a significant role in activating or triggering behaviour towards products purchasing, which provide direction and purpose to drive to relevant behaviour. In marketing Ipad Mini, what we should do firstly is to find out what motivations consumer would have. We could hand out questionnaires asking straightly to analyze the manifest motives and adopt some projective techniques to analyze the latent motives. And meanwhile, implement strategies in dealing with relevant three types of motivational conflict. Personality is a influencing factor that we can not ignore. According to two types of personality theories, every individual can find her/his personalities and tends to prefer product or brand with personalities that are pleasing them, so we could try to build Ipad Mini personalities like creative and smart to attract target market. Emotions could influence a lot toward consumers behaviour, try to arouse emotions which can increase attention, brand preference and so forth like increasing user experience in Apple stores and reduce emotions like bored-ness.

Demographics and lifestyle are important factors influencing consumer behaviour in marketing Ipad Mini., and significant in segmenting target marketing. Following graphs are the age structure in New Zealand reported in 2010 and the income development reported in the fourth quarter in 2012.(Development, 2010; NewZealand, 2012)

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It is manifest that people aged from 25-44 years old takes the most proportion in New Zealand(even to 2026), and the level of weekly income increases stably as the time goes(in 2012 it reached to $800/week). What is indicated above could shows that both current demographics and future changes can be factors to influence the Ipad Mini market segmentation and further to our target market. Lifestyle is a function of inherent individual characteristics that have been shaped and formed through social interaction as that person moves through the life cycle(G., Hawkins, & Pettigrew, 2011). We could use VALS system to help us identified social groups and search for data through internet to gain changes of lifestyle there will be in order to respond to changing consumer lifestyles more quickly.

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Reference:

Blog, Y. M. (2010). Apple iPad User Analysis — Phase II. Retrieved from http://ymobileblog.com/blog/2010/07/08/apple-ipad-user-analysis-%E2%80%94-phase-ii/
Development, M. o. S. (2010). Age and sex structure of the population. Retrieved from http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/people/age-sex-structure-population.html
G., P., Hawkins, D. I., & Pettigrew, S. (2011). Consumer behaviour: implications for marketing strategy. North Ryde, N.S.W: McGraw-Hill Education.
Mine, c. D. ( March 7, 2012). iPad Ownership Grows Among all U.S. Income Segments. Retrieved from http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2012/03/ipad-ownership-grows-among-all-income-segments-in-the-u-s/
NewZealand, S. (2012). New Zealand Income Survey: June 2012 quarter. Retrieved from http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/income-and-work/Income/NZIncomeSurvey_HOTPJun12qtr.aspx