Buying Motives/Behavior

Buying behavior, a component of consumer behavior, involves how people, in their roles as individual, household, and organizational consumers, seek [Page 206]satisfaction of their needs and wants through product acquisition and use. The focus is also often on the motivating factors that drive consumers to buy a certain brand of product. It can thus be said that buying behavior concerns how and why consumers acquire products.

Marketers must understand the buying behavior of consumers if they wish to maximize the probability of long-term success. Unfortunately for marketers, understanding buying behavior is much more an art than an exact science. The resultant challenges for marketers can be great in culturally diverse nations. These challenges are compounded when doing business in multiple countries, each with its own norms of behavior, preferences, and way of doing things—not to mention its own unique set of often complex motivating factors—that drive buying behavior.

In recent years, marketing scholars and managers have realized that long-term success is predicated not on making one-time sales to as many customers as possible but rather on the building and maintenance of trust-based relationships with a select group of targeted customers. It is also understood that establishing and maintaining these relationships involves a complex chain of events. This chain of events begins with the marketer consistently meeting customer needs, wants, and expectations. This, in turn, leads to high levels of customer satisfaction.

High levels of satisfaction facilitate the development of customer loyalty—wherein consumers habitually acquire your brand as a result of the experience-based belief that your brand is superior to competitive offerings. Loyalty implies that customers trust you to consistently meet their needs, wants, and expectations—to the point where they do not even consider buying competitive brands. High levels of customer loyalty allow the marketer to build and maintain profitable relationships with customers.

However, building customer relationships is not as easy as suggested above. In order to successfully meet customer needs, wants, and expectations—the first step in the relationship building process—marketers must first understand the multitude of often complex, ambiguous, and even subconscious motivating factors that drive the buying behavior of their targeted customers. When doing business internationally, understanding these motivating factors is predicated first and foremost on understanding the cultural background of targeted customers. This requires that marketers determine which aspects of a given culture most significantly influence buying behavior. They then need to understand how these cultural factors are likely to impact buying behavior.

Although culture is impossible to adequately define in several sentences—even pages—it can be viewed as the collection of shared meanings, rituals, norms of behavior, traditions, and preferences of a given society or subset of its people. Culture surrounds us and impacts all that we do. This includes what we do as consumers—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the places we shop, and why we prefer one brand of a given product type over others. The chances of marketing success are thus much higher when products are consistent with key cultural aspects of targeted consumers. When this consistency exists, consumers are motivated to at least consider buying your product. When it is not present, consumers may be motivated to avoid your product.

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