Henry Assael studied the buying habits of consumers and decided there are four categories that shoppers fit into
Customers who display complex buying behaviour patterns will get very involved in the purchase of the item or service and the difference between brands is a high priority.
So the company marketing the product should establish belief in the
brand, provide plenty of information and ensure that their product is
different from others.
Dissonance reducing buying behaviour
This relates to customers when they are happy to purchase a product but there are other brands which are very similar.
The problem with this behaviour pattern is that customer will become dissatisfied after purchasing a problem and this is very difficult to change.
Variety seeking buying behaviour
This is found in consumers when there is a lot of major difference between brands but they don't get very involved in in purchasing
When this happens, the company marketing the product should take following steps:
- They should try to get customers to continue to buy their product.
- Make Sure that the product is always available for the customer.
- Smaller companies should use sales promotion techniques to gain more customers.
Habitual buying behaviour
This relates to consumers who have little involvement in buying the product and also find that there are only very small differences between brands.
In this situation the following methods should be tried :
- Lower price and and offer sales promotions to try to make people want to buy.
- In advertisements, make sure that more visuals are used than text.
- Television is a great way of promoting this kind of product.
I hope that helps, it really is a fascinating study and I think we can all see where we fit into this model