THE BUYING PROCESS

The consumer buying process consists of five stages:

1. Alternative Search

2. Need Recognition

3. Alternative Evaluation

4. Purchase Decision

5. Post purchase Feelings

Need Recognition

The customer starts the purchase cycle by recognize an unmet need. This merely means that the client becomes attentive that he or she wants a good or a repair and makes a conclusion to acquire it.

A. H. Maslow, in his book Motivation and Personality, postulate that people knowledge a hierarchy of needs, where superior needs do not appoint until all earlier necessities in the hierarchy have been met. Maslow outlines the hierarchy as follows:

Physiological Need:.    This grouping refers to the needs of the human body, water, food, and sex.

Safety Needs.    This grouping refers to the need of humans to be protected from physical injury and unknown and potentially disadvantageous influences. These needs engage once a person's physiological needs have been met.

Social Need:.    This grouping refers to the need for humans to interact communally in groups and to experience a sense of association with others in a given group.

Esteem Needs.    This grouping refers to require for humans to be documented as important in other people's lives. These approaches are the basis for self-confidence and prestige.

Self-Actualization Need:.    This grouping refers to the need people have to identify all of their potential and to become everything they have the impending to become.3

Within the populace of the mass market, all needs pressure the purchase conclusion. Hence, marketing pains attempt to correspond how a given manufactured goods can address these requirements and to identify why the product is attractive to the goal consumer. For example, home safety systems can be market to appeal to one individual's safety wants while appealing to another's esteem needs.

Alternative Search and Alternative Evaluation

Frequent to the argument of the five stages, after a need has been recognized and realize, the alternative search and alter- native assessment stages begin. These stages can be measured together because the procedure is somewhat returning. The consumer acquires information on obtainable products that accomplish the recognized need. The consumer then compares obtainable products touching each other. This process repeats until the consumer is contented that enough alternatives have been measured and built. As an example, a first-year college student with dirty clothes might recognize the need for laundry detergent for the first time in his or her life. Upon incoming in the detergent gangway at the local grocery store, the student is confront with his or her unusual purchase options (Tide, Era, Gain, Cheer, etc.) and starts to compare them until he or she reaches a conclusion.

The alternative exploration and alternative assessment stages attach straight into Michael Porter's perception of threat of new entrant and threat of substitute explain in his aggressive Forces within an Industry Model. Thus the identical model that managers use to expand corporate strategy also has a direct submission in marketing a product. In this situation, a company with an offered product out in the market is constantly establishing or maintaining its location for the product in the shopper market. In the case of the laundry detergent example, the student is in the grocery accumulate irritating to make a decision, and to a degree, will go through this course of action each time she or he enter the store. The concept of threat of new entrant appear if some new manufactured goods on the market, Wonder Clean, promises to clean clothes so well that the clothes expand a confrontation  to receiving dirty again. If this feature particularly appeals to the student, he or she will purchase this manufactured goods instead of the extensively known products (Tide or Era).

The warning of substitute's perception can come into play as healthy. Say, for example, that whereas the student evaluates laundry choices, he or she notices a different kind of product on the ledge. This product is not laundry detergent at all, but a container of small natural rocks. The rocks themselves purportedly contain demonizing property when inundated in water that repels dirt and other toxins from clothing. In fact, according to the package, these rocks clean clothes better than any laundry detergent can, and they on no account sport out. If the college student purchases these rocks, then he or she has chosen a substitute product that may keep him or her from ever send abroad laundry detergent again.

The ideas captured in the Porter framework incorporate the buying development with concerns about the market in which the company is doing business, as well as the exterior forces touching that market. Using these frameworks in tandem allows marketing managers to regard as a more absolute picture when making marketing decisions about a product.

Purchase Decision

Following recognizing wants, identifying yield that meet those requirements, and evaluate each product's capacity to meet those needs, the consumer makes a purchase decision. Remember that the procure decision also includes the opportunity of not purchasing any product, thereby departure the needs unmet. For example, if the price of laundry detergent is too high, the student may make your mind up to drive home and use a friend's detergent to wash his or her clothes.

Postpurchase Feelings

The last stage of the buying procedure, post purchase feelings, is important to marketing professionals because of the connection between a customer's approach after a purchase and the long-term retention of that customer.