Market Research and Buyer Behavior - Activity: Internet Research

Market Research and Buyer Behavior - Activity: Internet Research

The primary VALS category is Achievers. This VALS category clearly describes me. This is due to the fact that, as it states an achiever poses goal-oriented lifestyles, and has a firm commitment to his/her family and career and basically that is me. As an achiever I live a conventional life, respect the state of the authority and am politically conservative. Due to my kind of work, I value predictability, consensus, self discovery as well as stability in the event of a risk.

Market segmentation is a vital concept in marketing. Marketing professionals can use the VALS segmentation clusters to group their customers according to their values and lifestyles (Olson, 2005). They can be grouped according to their sociological and psychological theories to forecast their behavior in the buying decision process. In most cases a company employs multiple bases to get a clear picture of its customers so as to create value of them. By so doing the marketing profession will define the targets for products as well as develop advertising media and copy strategies. In addition, the marketing professionals develop consumer knowledge after collecting qualitative and quantitative information about them and hence they are able to offer them better services.

Despite the fact that VALS Segmentation is a tool used for consulting and marketing to enable businesses to create and execute their marketing strategies, it has received a number of critics from various researchers (Olson, 2005). Researchers claim that psychographics are very weak at forecasting the purchases made by people. As a result this makes the VALS tool an inappropriate tool for the commercial decision makers. Moreover, the tool is criticized as too cultural particular for worldwide use.

References

Olson, P. (2005). Consumer Behavior and