According to the simple model of buyer behavior, what is in a buyers black box

It used to be that leads only had to be contacted seven times, on average, before making a purchase decision. But since 1997, Internet advertising has increased by more than 6,000 percent. A typical adult gets bombarded by thousands of ads every single day, and recent studies have shown that a sales sequence now requires at least 12 to 14 connections in order to be effective.

So, how do you make sure your marketing efforts stand out? The secret to successful selling comes from knowledge. Knowledge is power, and you need to understand exactly who your prospects are and how they behave to turn leads into customers.

In this guide, we’ll define consumer behavior, explore its principles, and provide clear examples. With a comprehensive consumer behavior model that illustrates how your customers think and why they buy, you’ll be able to construct personalized marketing campaigns that can achieve the improbable: transforming apathy into brand loyalty.

What is consumer behavior?

Consumer behavior is the study and analysis of consumer buying habits in marketing. It seeks to answer the age-old question: “Why do people choose to buy the things they buy?” Consumer behavior is often informed by an individual’s personality, psychology, social sphere, demographics, culture, environment, and marketing influences.

Deciphering consumer behavior helps businesses better understand and connect with the individuals who matter most to their success: the customer.

Getting to know the buyer

Before you can understand your buyers’ behavior, you need to know who they are. But you can’t take every buyer out for a cup of coffee. Instead, you’ll study and segment your average customers through market research and direct feedback, then carefully construct a buyer persona (or several) from the collected information.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, idealized version of your typical customer. This buyer travels through the sales funnel at a perfect pace and ticks all the boxes for a qualified lead. But your buyer persona does more than that. Because when you understand the wants, needs, and hang-ups of your buyer persona, you’ll also be diagnosing the pain points and identifying the objections of a large swath of your customer base.

With this information at your fingertips, it’s easy to create targeted, effective content and marketing materials. And one of the ways to understand your buyer persona (and therefore significant segments of your actual customers) is by examining how and why they might engage in predictable consumer behaviors.

Types of consumer behavior

The study of consumer behavior requires an understanding of both business and psychology. After all, how and what people decide to purchase can be influenced by everything from how well they slept last night to what’s trending on their Twitter feed.

There are several types of behavior that consumers generally engage in. According to a model developed by NYU Stern’s Henry Assael, buyer behavior can be broken down into four specific types:

• Complex buying behavior
• Dissonance-reducing buying behavior
• Habitual buying behavior
• Variety seeking behavior

Each type of behavior depends on two variables: how involved a buyer is in the purchase and how many differences there are between brands or products. Getting in tune with these variables gives you a clearer sense of how leads interact with your product as they progress through the customer journey.

Complex buying behavior

Buyer involvement: High
Brand difference: High

Complex buying behavior often occurs with high-stakes purchases like a new home, car, or computer. If the buyer is simultaneously spending a significant amount of money while choosing between brands with notable differences—Ford or Tesla, Apple or Android—they will likely feel the need to conduct in-depth research and therefore will be highly involved in the process.

Dissonance-reducing buying behavior

Buyer involvement: High
Brand difference: Low

Dissonance-reducing buying behavior occurs when a buyer is highly involved in their purchase, but the differences between brands are few or there are not many brands to choose between. These types of purchases are generally less frequent and more expensive, such as purchasing a music stand, coffee maker, or snowblower. A buyer is likely to worry whether they’re making the right choice—hence the dissonance.

Habitual buying behavior

Buyer involvement: Low
Brand difference: Low

When a buyer perceives few differences between brands and they have low involvement in the purchasing decision, they are engaging in habitual buying behavior. Typically, these purchases are for everyday items. A buyer doesn’t put a lot of thought into which sea salt or green tea is going into their shopping cart. They may choose based on convenience, availability, brand loyalty, or lowest price—but whatever their influence, they’re not spending much time researching their purchase.

Variety-seeking behavior

Buyer involvement: Low
Brand difference: High

Customers will engage in variety-seeking buying behavior, but it’s not necessarily because they are dissatisfied with a product. They might be bored and/or want to try something new. Involvement with the purchase is low, in part because it’s not high stakes to try a new scented hand soap or different type of breakfast cereal.

Understanding how consumers lock into these variables of buyer involvement and brand difference means you can be in step with them through their customer journey. Meanwhile, your sales team can respond effectively to the type of behavior your buyers engage in.

Consumer behavior theory

Companies desperately want to understand the ways that customers interact with their products, services, and marketing. After all, identifying the what and why of consumer behavior is the secret to selling more consistently, rapidly, and in greater amounts.

Various consumer behavior theories throughout history have combined ideas from economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, and chemistry. Here are five of the main schools of thought which govern consumer behavior theory.

1. Psychoanalysis

   Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory asserts that consumers’ unconscious psychological impulses shape their purchasing behavior. These impulses include a person’s hidden desires, fears, motives, or aspirations.

2. Socio-psychology

   Thorstein Veblen’s socio-psychological model posits that a consumer’s social and cultural background are the most important factors that influence their purchasing behavior. Rather than fulfilling basic needs, consumers are driven more by a need to maintain social class, income, and cultural or subcultural prestige.

3. Reasoned action

   According to the theory of reasoned action (TRA), a consumer assesses a product or service. If they have a positive attitude about it and they believe that people in their social group will also approve, they are more likely to make that purchase.

4. Impulse buying

   Hawkins Stern’s theory of impulse buying, first advanced in 1962, considers the confluence of internal and external forces an individual experiences during the purchasing process. Instead of relying on their own careful thought or consideration, an individual making an impulse buy is more likely under the influence of external forces, like discounts, promotions, peers, or service quality.

5. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

   Stern’s theory was a direct argument against Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory from the early 1940s. Maslow’s hierarchy argues that humans prioritize needs in a particular order: psychological or survival, safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. In terms of consumer behavior, an individual will prioritize needs according to the hierarchy.

   While each of these theories addresses different aspects of a buyer, they’re all working to accomplish the same thing: making sense of how consumers behave. And they all have a few basic consumer principles in common that can apply to any individual.

Consumer behavior influences

Like molecules of water in the sea, individual behaviors are limitless. However, by creating buyer personas, your marketing and sales teams are acknowledging and taking advantage of the fact that most behaviors are guided by broader currents. We can boil down every individual consumer’s influences to three basic areas: personal, psychological, and social.

Personal factors

A customer’s buying behavior has a lot to do with their personality. Are they outgoing or reserved? Quick to joke or quite sensitive? In addition to temperament, a buyer’s interests and opinions can influence their purchasing behavior. In turn, demographics such as age, locale, culture, gender, profession, or level of education can influence an individual’s interests, preferences, morals, values, and opinions. An individual buyer persona’s purchasing power also matters. If they can’t afford your product or service, they’re probably not going to commit to that purchase.

Psychological factors

Consumers respond differently to marketing campaigns depending on their psychological makeup. This includes their general outlook on life, motivations, attitudes, and perceptions. These factors are highly variable, often changing from day to day, so they’re particularly challenging to predict.

Social factors

Consumers’ social groups also affect how they shop. Peer pressure or group influence from immediate family, friends, classmates, or colleagues can play a significant role in purchasing decisions. Social factors extend to a person’s economic class as well as their social media practices. An individual’s presence on various social media platforms can expose them to fads and trends that may influence their buying behavior.

Consumer behavior patterns

An individual’s pattern of behavior can influence how they make purchases. To discern what any singular buyer’s patterns are, you need answers to:

• What and how much do they purchase?
• How often do they buy?
• Where do they make their purchases?
• What’s their preferred method to make purchases?

By identifying clear patterns of behavior, your marketing team can formulate a well-crafted buyer persona. And your sales team can employ that buyer persona to whisk a real-life buyer through the pipeline.

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