BUYING BEHAVIOUR

Buying Behaviour



Buying Behavior

Introduction

Recently I got to purchase an IPod for myself. To be able to evaluate the product and its efficiency effectively, it is essential to know and completely understand the product first. I-pod is a famed portable media player marketed and made by Apple Inc and has evolved very quickly over time. The iPod family consists of the touch screen iPod Touch, the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle, hard-drive-based iPod Classic, and Compact iPod Nano. IPod can also serve as storage devices for external-data as many other digital music players.

Consumer Behavior

The disposal and use of products is associated to consumer behavior and involves their purchases and its study. How consumption increases can be encouraged, and the way the positioning of a product is done, is of great interest to marketers. It is with the information a marketer has about the customer that the product can be effectively designed and positioned in a way the appeal to the customer (Slaughter, 2006, pp. 83).

Variety seeking buying behavior

One of the behavior that may be involved in making purchases when it comes to the iPod is the variety. There are some products that a customer buys just because they are interested in a variety, not the features. The iPod is one of the few products that have evolved in a tremendous pace, allow a long line of products catering to the variety sensitive customer. The customers who buy them for variety are mostly young working adults with sufficient money to spare to entertain their variety seeking behavior (Shun, 2006, pp. 28).

Dissonance reduction buying behavior

Buying an iPod for a younger customer base may be more than an option of variety or habitual buying, but more of behavior concerned with utility, image and the reduction of dissonance. Apple is a very strong brand and may create impulsion for younger customers because of peer pressure to buy. Purchasing Apple brands, such as the iPod, is a step to reduce the discomfort and dissonance which possibly caused by peer pressure, or the demand of social status. It is also important to keep in mind that such a purchase for a younger customer may be important considering the product which requires a decent amount of money, which may not be easily available with the customer. Hence the decision may require exceptional customer involvement (Hoch, 1985, Pp. 23).

Features of Consumer Behavior

Loyalty is the tendency for (some) consumers to stick to the same products. With this as a key effect, deterministic, continuous-time models will be systems of ordinary differential equations; the stronger the loyalty, the slower the changes in numbers of people buying particular products. For discrete-time models, the degree of loyalty corresponds to the size of diagonal elements in a transition matrix. On the other hand, with no loyalty (or influence of other people) whatsoever, market share — or chance of someone making a particular purchase — has no dynamic behavior and would instead depend only upon what is currently on the supermarket ...