[MUSIC] Welcome to the Marketing Strategies Specialization MOOC being offered by IE Business School. I am Shameek Sinha, I am going to teach two courses under these specialization. So first of all I am going to cover marketing research and then consumer behavior. So out of these two courses we have different topics, but we start off with consumer behavior fundamentals, followed up with some of the decision processes. How do you make decisions overall when you are deciding on purchasing a product? Then as we go into the marketing research fundamentals we talk about the basic ideas and then we'll go into how you collect your data and analyze your data. So I'm sure you're going to have a nice experience. There's a lot of things which I'll talk about but I'm very hopeful that you are going to enjoy the entire mode. Thanks a lot and see you in the upcoming videos. [MUSIC] Welcome to the Marketing Specialization MOOC being offered by IE Business School. So let us just dig immediately into why do we study even consumer behavior? If we look at the marketing decision process which has mainly three components, first is identifying the market opportunities. Second one is setting the strategy, and the third one is setting the marketing mix. If you look at the three steps, the first step which is the identify marketing opportunities. Consumer behavior immediately comes at this stage because this is where the company tries to look at who are your customers, what is the company internally looking like, and what is the competition? Immediately afterwards when you talk about the marketing research part, that actually looks into these three aspects much more deeply. So why do we even study consumer behavior? So consumer behavior by definition is all the psychological and behavioral aspects of the consumer's decision making process, be it individual or be it group level. All the stages which consumers go through, starting from looking at the need of the consumers. What are the different information available? How do consumers go through identifying the different characteristics of the product, then making the purchase, using the product and eventually going ahead to evaluate the product. Of course, if he likes the product, he might recommend it to somebody else. This is all encompassed in the consumer behavior process. Why do we even study consumer behavior? For the simple reason that marketers need to know who these consumers are in order to satisfy their needs, while at the same time, as a marketer, you're objective should be to maximize your profitability. In the consumer behavior process, usually what we should be very careful about is what are the different factors which influence consumers behavior. There can be some factors which are more internal, but as there are some factors which are more external. What can be potential internal factors in consumer behavior? So the basic importance of learning consumer behavior is that you have to understand what are the factors which influence consumer behavior. The first factor, the factors are more internal but as we have another set of factors which are more external. What are the potential internal factors? Something like the personality of the consumer, how the person is. Is he risk taking, or is he risk averse? What kind of lifestyle does the consumer have? Is he from an affluent family, or is he relatively poor? Another thing which influences consumers' behavior is the age of the consumer, or maybe even the gender of the consumer. What kind of products men will buy versus what kind of products do women buy? Older people might be buying very different set of products than younger people. So essentially, these are the different factors which have to be taken into consideration when understanding consumer behavior. Now let's look into the external factors. What are the different external factors which we should consider? One of them is reference groups. So as consumers we often talk to our friends which is possibly a reference group. We look at other consumers with their reviews, understand their expert opinion and these are also reference groups. Second external factor is your family. Have the product been bought by one of the members of your family, your parents, your brothers, your nieces or nephews and so on. That also introduced your behavior. The third external factor is culture. Of course, as we all know, different cultures have different purchasing patterns. A western culture would be buying very different products than an eastern culture. In terms of pure inclination towards different products, that also differs across countries and across cultures. And finally, we have to remember, when studying customer behavior, one of the most important external factor is the situation of the economy. When there is a regular economy without any economic fluctuations, of course consumers have more disposable income. So they will buy better products. Buy more, which is good for the company. But under recessions or economic downturns consumers will be less willing to buy products that frequently, they might be buying more of the frequently purchased products like your food products, milk, eggs and so on. But they might be less likely to buy more durable products like TV, cars and so on. So definitely, the economic situation influences consumers purchase behavior overall. And these are the factors which have to be kept into mind. When studying the behavior of consumers. [MUSIC]
