Consumer Behavior Essay

Introduction

The study of consumer behavior has proven to be of added value to marketing executives and middle managers who design marketing strategies. Managers understand and utilize consumer attitude, which includes emotions, self-monitoring and cognition, when attempting to gain a competitive advantage through developing various marketing strategies. This paper will review appropriate theories of consumer attitudes and develop various advertising, merchandising and selling strategies based on these propositions. To counter consumer defense mechanisms, this paper will also discuss competitive war battlefield tactics.

Marketing managers match various marketing strategies with the attitudes of typical consumers. However, most of the time, the facts of a product are perilously similar to the facts of its competition. That is when cognition yields to attitude, or how a consumer will feel about a product. One would think attitude gives way to cognition as the price of the product increases. That is not necessarily so.

Face-to-face research with automotive shoppers showed selections are made based on emotion. (Edell & Burke, 1987) For example, a young male consumer with $35,000 who has an interest in buying a high-performance car may not be inclined to read literature on every model in that class or take notes on comparable autos. Rather, studies show many consumers are more apt to walk into a showroom, spot a model, peer at the instrument panel, sit behind the wheel, get out and say to the salesperson, "I like the red HPZX car". In essence, the automobile feels good; therefore it must be the best purchase. Under these circumstances, the consumer exhibits a high propensity of self-monitoring. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that information – processing (cognition) improves consumers' abilities to evaluate product quality.