Consumer decision making: process, level and style 121
has long been known that consumers are far
more likely to be influenced by the word-of-
mouth evaluations of other consumers than
by formal marketing communications. This
managerial style is forced on to the firm if it
is to survive and prosper. The need to under-
stand consumer behaviour is, therefore, prem-
ier if it is to be forecast, anticipated and
stimulated by marketing management.
The consumer decision process
This means more than monitoring sales: con-
sumer-orientated marketing needs a far wider
definition of consumer behaviour. Engel et al.
(1991, p. 4) define their subject matter as
‘those activities directly involved in obtaining,
consuming, and disposing of products and
services, including the decision processes that
precede and follow these actions’. In addition
to making a purchase, therefore, we shall
understand consumer behaviour to include
any pre-purchase and post-purchase activities
that are relevant to marketing management.
Pre-purchase activities would include the
growing awareness of a want or need, and
the search for and evaluation of information
about the products and brands that might
satisfy it. Post-purchase activities would
include the evaluation of the purchased item
in use, and any attempt to assuage feelings of
anxiety which frequently follow the purchase
of an expensive and infrequently bought item
such as a car. Each of these influences
whether consumers will repurchase a chosen
brand, what they will tell other potential
buyers, and how amenable they are to mar-
keting communications and the other ele-
ments of the marketing mix.
Consumer behaviour, we have seen, can be
modelled as a cognitive process, an intellectual
sequence of thinking, evaluating and deciding.
These information processing activities are
believed to shape the more overt aspects of
choice: acquiring information from a sales-
person, placing an order, using the product
selected, and so on. The inputs to the process
are the most basic bits of data available to the
consumer, stimuli from the environment in the
form of marketing messages and conversations
with friends and relatives. The processing itself
consists of the mental treatment of these data as
the consumer stores them, links them with
existing ideas and memories, and evaluates
their relevance to his or her personal goals. The
outputs are the attitudes the consumer forms
towards, say, an advertised brand, an intention
to buy or postpone buying, and – if attitude and
intention are positive – the act of purchase. A
similar sequence characterizes the use of the
purchased item: it is evaluated again in use and
a decision is reached about its suitability for
repurchase.Awareness
Figure 6.1, derived from Foxall et al. (1998),
summarizes the process of consumer decision
making. Consumer awareness is not automatic;
it is the endpoint of a highly selective proce-
dure. Every day, consumers are bombarded by
thousands of messages that seek to persuade
them – from advertising, from political organi-
zations, from religious groups, from employers,
and from numerous other sources. There is
enormous competition for the attention and
understanding of the average citizen to the
extent that no one could possibly cope with the
cumulative effect on the nervous system of so
great a mass of information. Fortunately, most
of these social, economic and marketing stimuli
in the environment are filtered out by the
individual’s attentional and perceptual pro-
cesses, and have no effect on the decision
process.
Efficiency in decision making requires that
attention and perception be selective; a kind of
perceptual defence mechanism screens out all
but those messages that are familiar, consistent
with our current beliefs and prejudices,
motives, expectations and wants. Even so-
called subliminal messages – an attempt to