Personal factors affecting consumer buying behavior

Possibly the most challenging concept in marketing is to understand why buyers do what they do (or don’t do). But such knowledge is critical for marketers since having a strong understanding of buying behavior will help shed light on what is important to the customer and also suggest the important influences on customer decision making.

There are many factors that can affect Buying process of a customer, let us shed some light on some personal factors which influence the buying process of the customer.

1) Age and Life cycle Stage

Like the social class the customer life cycle can have a significant impact on consumer behaviour. The life cycle is an orderly series of stages in which consumer attitude and behavioural tendencies evolve and occur because of developing maturity, experience, income, and status. Marketers often define their target market in terms of the consumers present lifecycle stage. The concept of lifecycle as applied to marketing will be discussed in more details.

2) Occupation And Income

Today people are very concerned about their image and the status in the society which is a direct outcome of their material prosperity. The profession or the occupation of the person has an impact on the products they consume. The status of a person is projected through various symbols like the dress, accessories and possessions.

3) Life Style

Our life styles are reflected in our personalities and self-concepts, same is the case with any consumer. We need to know what a lifestyle is made of. It is a person’s mode of living as identified by his or her activities, interest and opinions. There is a method of measuring a consumer’s lifestyle.

This method is called as the psychographics – which is the analysis technique used to measure consumer lifestyles – peoples activities, interests and opinions. Then based upon the combinations of these dimensions, consumers are classified. Unlike personality typologies, which are difficult to describe & measure, lifestyle analysis has proven valuable in segmenting and targeting consumers according to their lifestyle classification.

4) Personality

Personality is the sum total of an individual’s enduring internal psychological traits that make him or her unique. Self-confidence, dominance, autonomy, sociability, defensiveness, adaptability, and emotional stability are selected personality traits.

Above were the main 4 factors affecting consumer buying behavior. Based on these factors, we can decide the ways to influence the customer.