134 The Marketing Book
e.g. salt. In such a case, there is no learning
process. It is characteristic of athletic shoes and
adult cereals. Such choice is repetitive: the
consumer learns from past experience and with
little or no decision making buys a brand that is
satisfactory. The purchase is important to the
consumer because of involvement in sport in
the case of athletic shoes and nutritional needs
in the case of cereals. Brand loyalty is probable
on the basis of satisfaction with a repertoire of
known brands. This does not necessarily reflect
active brand commitment; it is just satisfying.
Information search and evaluation are limited,
if they exist at all. Since most brands in
established markets are similar however, a
consumer may on occasion try a new brand if it
appears to provide the characteristics of the
product class.
Variety-seeking behaviouroccurs when there
is low involvement and significant brand dif-
ferences. The consumer chooses something new
to relieve boredom. This is typical consumer
behaviour for canned vegetables and paper
towels. Boredom and a search for variety leads
to multi-brand purchasing, when risks are
minimal and the consumer has less commit-
ment to a particular brand. The decision is not
important enough to make pre-planning worth-
while, so the decision is made in the store.
There is little to lose by buying a new kind of
biscuit on impulse.
The conventional wisdom provides easy
prescriptions for managerial action: just focus
on market initiators, who can be assumed to be
innovators, at each stage of the new product
development and marketing process. But the
research indicates that there are three problems
with that. First, each launch segment has a
unique decision making style. Second, each
active segment therefore requires its own
launch marketing mix, reflecting the decision
style and involvement level of its members.
Third, post-launch markets – the markets for
imitators – are also segmented by decision style
and require multifaceted marketing.
The results show that more than one of
these patterns of buying behaviour is character-
istic of new product purchasing or use for the
same product, at the same time. A more
sophisticated analysis is suggested in Figure
6.3, which proposes that complex buying is
typical of highly-involved adaptors, dissonant
buying of highly-involved innovators, habitual
buying of low-involved adaptors, and variety-
seeking of low-involved innovators.
Complex consumer behaviour occurs when
the consumer is highly involved and perceives
the product as discontinuous. The consumer
goes through a cognitive learning process, i.e.
information search, brand evaluation, detailed
post-adoption appraisal etc. Such behaviour is
typical of highly involved adaptors.Figure 6.3 Decision styles of market initiators