Consumer Behavior Decision Process

Consumer Behavior Decision Process

As most consumers, I carefully evaluate the attributes of a product, brand or service in order to rationally select the one that will fulfill my needs or be the solution to my problem. There are some that buy certain products or services depending on costs, brand loyalty, and values to name a few but there are many aspects that will change and influence consumers to choose between brands for many different reasons. Recently I did a high involvement purchase, which I categorize to fit perfectly in the extended decision making process.

The first step of the extended decision making process is the problem recognition. This process involves an extensive internal and external information search which can be influenced by any factor, also the evaluation of several alternatives and going through the post-purchase evaluation. As a college student in 2012 its almost required to be connected to the internet all the time, to check emails, grades, assignments, news, social network, application processes, communication, and a thousand more reasons. I recognized the need of a tablet. After a few years in college I identified I had an inactive problem, a problem that had a solution I was not aware one hundred percent. As the gadget world of mobile technology improves and improves every day giving solutions to problems we never thought were problems before. For instance, the reason why I decided I needed a tablet were the following, I could buy the online version of my textbooks so I would save money and eliminate the need of carrying a heavy 500 page book everywhere, my entire family have mobile devices from where we can communicate via videoconferencing, texting, and email, its faster and more convenient to check news and mail in a tablet than in a computer. Here is when I understand that this is only a problem to me because of my situation, if a take a look into the factors beyond the control of the marketing managers that affected my problem recognition, u was influenced by my social status, reference groups, household characteristics, emotions, motives and of course current situation. Also the actual state that influenced me was the product and brand performance and availability of products. In this process of problem recognition I started switching to the next step which is information search.

After recognizing the problem, the next step is information search in which the use of long term memory is used to determine many things such as satisfactory, characteristics of potential solutions and appropriate ways to compare solutions. Basically is an internal search, in which I started looking at what options did I had and connecting my past experiences with