Consumer Behaviour Analysis for Book Store Chains

Introduction:

Since the onset of commerce, consisting of barter trading from the early times to monetary terms today, it had been vital for any businesses who wants to survive or succeed in their undertakings to be able to provide the customers’ needs or wants through understanding them.

With the increasing complexities in today’s business arena, this ability to understand the consumer and their buying behavior becomes increasingly essential, this being further compounded with the introduction of the internet, drastically changing the way businesses used to run traditionally in “brick and mortar” mode. To understand the consumers, it is imperative for us to understand the culture of the place of business in order to understand why, what, when, where and how the consumers that will enable us to formulate marketing strategies leading to the success of the business, further expounding the notion of “Think Global, Act Local”.

In analyzing the sustainability and survivability of book stores, the understanding of the culture, regardless local or global in conjunction to the impact of rapid transforming technologies in the internet realms inevitably plays a gigantic role in the rise and falls of book stores; such example as the fall of Borders , an international book retailer whose fall is largely contributed to its inability to recognize and adapt to these changes, unlike Barnes & Noble (another leading book retailer in the USA) who manage to capitalize on the internet wave and propel itself to be the internet’s largest bookstore with over one million titles of books available.

We will be studying into the culture in Singapore, the trending and impact to the company’s marketing strategies and the way forward to enable the company to sustain, and propel to success in the years ahead.

Culture and its prevalence in Singapore

Culture can be simply described as the society’s personality that shapes our identities as individuals or an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. It includes abstract ideas such as values and ethics and material objects like cars and clothing. It is the shared meaning of our rituals, norms, and traditions among members of a society or organization.

Shown below in Figure 1.1, are factors impacting on culture. They are namely; social interaction, aesthetics, language, education, value system, material life and religion.

Figure 1.1

Overall, these components form the fundamental bedrocks in the studying of culture of the place of business. Social interaction amongst people, such as nuclear family, extended family; reference