Identify the store and the day and time you made your observation.
For it to be possible for me to observe the behaviours of the consumers, I visited my local grocery store known as Ides. Ides is a renowned chain grocery store in my native village and where I carry out my grocery shopping. The two aisles I landed on were the: Cereal Wembley and smoky Aisle in order to determine and see how consumer behaviour changes for different products. Besides , discovering that consumers may conduct themselves differently depending on time of the day it is, I went to the local store twice, once in Wednesday (around 2pm when there are not many buyers and window shoppers there) and (around 6-7pm when the store is normally packed) with hoards of humanity coming from work and stopping at the grocery store for purchases and window shopping.
Analyse the behaviours you observed to determine how consumers progressed through the consumer behaviour process while in different aisles.
I critically observed 6 consumers in number, consumer E, F and G in the Wembley aisle and consumer I, J and K in the Smoky aisle. The details are summarized in the Appendix. When carrying out purchase decision and plan, a consumer undergoes through a process which is normally consists of various stages the stages are: recognition, searching for information about the product, evaluation of available possibilities and alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behaviour. In this experiment, consumers realized that they have the will to acquire cereal or smoky goods for food. At the granary, these consumers realize that there are many options, more so for cereals. I have always been impressed by the way various types of cereals that the local village grocery store contains. These consumers carried out their decision on purchases on the basis for price, value and complacency with the product. After making their decision, these consumers demonstrated different post-purchase behaviour. Some of them picked the product and immediately left the aisle while others stayed in the aisle looking for other alternatives even though there was no mind change in them.
Assess how consumers determine value for their various purchases. This can be addressed with at least two (2) specific consumer examples or by combining all the consumers you observed.
In analysing how the consumers strive to make purchasing decisions, we need to fully understand the value systems and the purchasing power of the consumers. Customer value therefore is the satisfaction a consumer enjoys after making a purchase for goods or services in comparison to what she must give up to receive them also called the opportunity cost. Most of the consumers do not consider value products just in terms of the amount of money spent, but can also consider the duration it takes to acquire a purchased product and interactions with personnel who provide quality services to customers
Experiential.
Experiential also known as hedonic value is concerned with the degree to which a product generates appropriate experiences, feelings, and emotions for the consumer. Most of the times consumers are loyal to some specific brands as they are guaranteed to generate the experience the consumers are searching for. That explains why consumer G just grabbed the box she wants without spending the time looking at other cereals in the aisle. Consumer Es’ purchasing decision is propelled by the emotion value. As the mother saw how content her kid was when she picked the box of cereal, she was happy to see her child happy about getting something he liked. Therefore, she purchased the product not only to make her kid happy but also to make herself feel good about being a good mother and making her child happy.
Cost or sacrifice value.
Consumers also try to minimize the costs and other sacrifices that may be involved in the purchase, ownership, and use of a product. Cost/sacrifice value is concerned with these transaction costs. This value plays a big role in the decision process of Consumer A and Consumer E. Both of them are very cost-driven, which leads them to choose the products that are being sale and or discounted. By choosing these products, they are successful in minimizing the cost which is the most important value to this group.
Pick two specific consumers that seemed to be very different from each other. Contrast how these two (2) consumers progressed through the consumer perception process.
Consumer E and Consumer F appear to have a very varied view process. Consumer E knows exactly what she wants: she is very much propelled by experiential value. Maybe her past experience with a certain brand formed her perception of this brand. Therefore, she is very brand-loyal and knows exactly what she wants when she is in the aisle. It is difficult to change her view and induce a different product to her.
Consumer F is different as her view of a product doesn’t come from her own personal experience. It fluctuates a lot with the behaviour of her kid and maybe even the price. She implements the decision on the basis of how much her kid likes or dislikes a certain product. As we are aware know, children are not very stable and change their preferences very often. Based on my critical observation, it seems the mother’s perception changes with her kid’s reaction and attitudes, tastes and preferences. She picked up many products and put many down along the aisles following her kid. In other words, the mother is not brand-loyal at all. Instead, she is more an impulse buyer: she buys the products that make her kid happy.
Analyse how different manufacturers motivated consumers to pick their specific brands. Articulate thoroughly the behaviours displayed and tactics used by the store or manufacturer to motivate the purchase.
Consumer F’s behaviour confirmed that children have a huge impact on parents’ purchasing behaviour and power since how the children feel about the product influences the experiential value of the products to the parents. The manufacturers know this fact very well. For example Randy Page (2008) elaborated the product promotion strategies ,methods and techniques not forgetting the contents features that manufactures use to lure children, including using different size of packages, Front Panel Characteristics (e.g. Images of popular toys, TV characters), Activity Features (e.g. Stories or story-completion, Tricks or magic) and cross-promotions (e.g. Movie tie-in and TV show tie-in). The targeting continues at the store level as the stores will place these cereals at the low level shelves so that children can easily see them.
As discussed earlier, some consumers are moved by the level of prices. In order to make sales among such consumers, we usually have both manufacturers and granary occasionally running promotions for their products or sometimes even offer coupons. For example in-granary promotions, daily deals and cross-promotions for the products. Such a strategy established for discount seems to be well performing in this group since both Consumer F and Consumer J ended up acquiring the goods that are on-sale. It is worth recognising that over the past few years, increasingly number of granaries have been selling goods which can easily be identified with their own company product brands. The granaries most of the time put such generic-branded goods on special promotion and leads to excess amount of sales among these cost-driven customers for the products
In order to attract most of the health cautious consumers, manufacturers most of the time emphasize on the health benefits on the packages of the products available. For example, on a Cereal box of the Quaker Oat, you can find “50 grams of WHOLE GRAINS” and “HELP Can help LOWER CHOLESTEROL” in captain on the front side. The Wheat bread is much more higher in fiber. Fiber in food is mostly necessary for a healthy digestive system. Also it absorbs much of the cholesterol and fats such that one’s body does not retain them. Also for most of the health conscious shoppers granaries have added sections that catered to healthy living and cooking.
In general, both the manufactures and granaries use different techniques to target customers with differentiated value systems.
Appendix
Consumer E | Description | Aisle | Observation Time | Decision Making |A | Older couple | Cereal Aisle | @ 2pm | Couple was walking back and forth in the aisle numerous times and specking with each other. They were Observing the promotion and they final picked the sale item. |
F | A mother with a kid | Cereal Aisle | @ 3pm | Kids pointed to several boxes and at the end the mom took one that the kid liked |
G | A mid-age lady | Cereal Aisle | @ 6pm | Knows what she wants, crabbed the box and scanned the rest quickly but didn’t pick anyone. |
H | A mid-age lady | smoky cereal | @ 5pm | Very health cautious: only looked at organic and whole wheat bread. Picked the expensive type. |
I | An mid-age lady | smoky | @5pm | Price-driven: Look at the sales and picked the one that has the biggest discount. |
K| A mid-age lady | smoky | @5pm | value -driven: Look at the sales and picked the one that has the bestquality.
Work Cited
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