Marketing: Evaluating External Stimulus such as Demographics from a Consumer Psychological Perspective within the Parameters of GCTICE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW1

Customer Decision-Making Process and Personality1

Black-Box Model of Consumer Behavior4

Pre-Purchase Behavior5

Post-Purchase Dissonance and Back-Out Behavior10

Demographic Variables12

Gender12

Ethnicity14

Age15

Lifestyle16

Social Class18

Geographic Variables20

Cognitive Dissonance21

Factors Contributing to Dissonance22

Dissonance Reduction23

Summary25

REFERENCES26

APPENDIX - A41

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

Customer Decision-Making Process and Personality

The customer buying behavior can be defined as the decision process that customer go through to buy a product. It is said that the customer's purchasing behavior mainly depends on different factors like the historical, cultural and political processes. The historical processes affect the buying behavior in such a way that a person's history affects his beliefs and norms very much. It is the person's historical and family background, physical environment, social set up, traditions and even age and generational gap affect the buying behavior of a person.

Consumerism is a term used to describe the effects of the identification of happiness with the personal purchase, possession and consumption of material goods continuously, generally favored by excessive advertising. Consumerism can refer both to build, purchase or consumption of goods and services considered nonessential, such as political and economic system which promotes competitive procurement of wealth as a sign of status and prestige within a social group.

The mass consumption in contemporary society seriously compromises the natural resources and ecological balance. Consumerism understood as the acquisition or shopping spree, idealizes its effects and consequences associated with their practice of obtaining personal satisfaction and even happiness personnel.

Many people think of branding as a logo, identity, service, or product the organization produces. It is not. “A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service or organization…. It's not what you say it is. It's what they say it is” (Neumeier, 2003). In today's environment, the best way to build the brand is by building the trust that customers have toward the organization, since trust is the underlying factor in most purchasing decisions. Trust comes about when an organization proves its reliability to its customers and delights them with service by exceeding customer expectations.

The nonprofit organization that is successful at branding will have differentiated itself from similar organizations by focusing on purposely being different, by being innovative in its creative marketing approach, and by engaging with the customer in the marketing process with dialogue. Without the customer, without the conversation, without the brand, there is no tribe, and marketing today is all about building tribes around the brand (Neumeier, 2003).

The purpose of branding in the non-profit realm is to convince more people to continually support the organization with larger gifts over the course of time or to encourage more volunteers to give their time in increasing increments or to maintain highly qualified and efficient staff who work more and more effectively and move the mission forward or to encourage more foundations to give more next year over this past year … on and on. But none of that will happen if the perceived trustworthiness of the organization diminishes if the brand is ...