This document discusses factors that influence consumer buyer behavior, including cultural, social, personal, psychological factors. It also outlines the typical buyer decision process of need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. As a case study, it examines car buying behavior in Romania. It finds that culture, social influences from family, personal factors like age and income, and psychological factors like motives and attitudes all impact car purchasing decisions in Romania. Younger consumers prioritize performance while older consumers consider other factors more important.

1. NURCIU CHIRANA MIHAELA
GROUP 934
CONSUMER MARKETS AND
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

2.  Consumer market contains all the
individuals and households that buy or
acquire goods and services for personal
consumption.
 Consumer buyer behavior is the
buying behavior of final consumers:
individuals and households that buy
goods and services for personal
consumption.

3. 1. Consumer buyer behavior
The factors that affect consumer
buyer behavior are:

4.  1.1 Cultural factors
 The first factor which is affecting consumer
behavior is culture. Culture is the most basic
cause of a person’s wants and behavior.
 1.2 Social factors
 A consumer’s behavior also is influenced by
social factors, such as the consumer’s small
groups, family, and social roles and status.
 Many small groups influence a person’s
behavior.

5.  Family members can strongly influence buyer behavior.
The family is the most important consumer buying
organization in society.
 1.3 Personal factors
 A buyer’s decisions also are influenced by personal
characteristics such as the buyer’s age and life-cycle
stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, and
personality and self-concept.
 Buying is also shaped by the stage of the family life
cycle: the stages through which families might pass as
they mature over time.
 A person’s occupation affects the goods and services
bought.
 A person’s economic situation will affect his or her
store and product choices. There are watched trends in
personal income, savings.
 Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in
his or her psychographics.

6. 1.4. Psychological factors
 A person’s buying choices are further influenced by
four major psychological factors: motivation,
perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.
 A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to
direct the person to seek satisfaction.
 A motivated person is ready to act. How the person
acts is influenced by his or her own perception of
the situation.
 When people act, they learn. Learning describes
changes in an individual’s behavior arising from
experience..
 Through doing and learning, people acquire beliefs
and attitudes.

7.  2.The buyer decision process
 The buying process starts with need recognition
meaning that the buyer recognizes a problem or
need.
 The second step is the information search: an
interested consumer may or may not search for
more information

8.  Alternative evaluation is the third of the buyer
decision process in which the consumer uses
information to evaluate alternative brands in the
choice set.
 In the evaluation stage, the consumer ranks
brands and forms purchase intentions. Generally,
the consumer’s purchase decision will be to buy
the most preferred brand.
 The last stage is the postpurchase behavior:
after purchasing the product, the consumer will
either be satisfied or dissatisfied and will engage
in postpurchase behavior.

9. STUDY CASE : CARS BUYING
BEHAVIOR IN ROMANIA
 Consumers often engage in limited problem
solving when buying a car because a buyer may
buy it occasionally .
 The first factor: culture is the cause of the
decision making. Depending on the person’s
culture he decides whether a car is a necessity or
a comfort. From the case study in Romania, 58%
of the population think that a car is a necessity
and 42% consider it as a comfort,fad.
 Social influences also exist such as taking the
decision wih your family. The investigation results
tell us that 75.4% of our respondents ever
discussed their car purchasing decisions with

10.  As for the personal factors, which play a major role
in the buying decision the first one is the buyer’s
age. By examining the difference of the importance
in means by age groups, we could find out that
younger people (age less than 30) consider the
power and performance of the car more important
than relatively older people, which means younger
people pursue more driving pleasure than other age
groups. Younger people (age less than 30) also
consider brand image more important than other age
groups.

11.  The occupation affects the sort of car: an elegant one
or a sport one. Skilled employees : workers in
manufacturing, retailing, catering and service
industries; bus and truck drivers, police and firefighters
prefer cheap and small cars. Office workers,
technicians, teachers, engineers, freelancers have
middle class cars. And the persons who own the most
well paid jobs such as government top officials, top
corporate executives, successful professionals acquire
expensive and luxurious cars like Mercedes,BMW and
Audi.
 On the person’s economic situation depends the
money assigned for the car, depending on the income
the person has. By examining the budget groups who
plan to purchase cars within two years, we find out
that respondents with more budget takes fuel
consumption and after-sale maintenance less
important and take exterior design more important

12.  At the lifestyle factor most of people consider of
purchasing a car as a very important or fairly
important decision, about 60% totally. About 32% of
people chose “neither” important nor “unimportant”.
 Psychological influences tend to impact a buyer’s
motives, perception,learning and attitudes.
 The motives in buying a car differs in genders.
Female consumers consider value for money and
safety more important than male consumers.Male
consumers consider power and brand image more
important than female consumers.

13.  The managerial implication perceptive, in this
study found that four variables have significant
relationship with intention purchase towards
automobile industries especially for imported car.
The variables were Value Consciousness, Price
Quality inference, Risk Averseness, and Beliefs.
 The differences of importance in means by
education are examined: young people with
higher education level take “riding comfort”,
“safety”, and “equipment and interior” more
important than other education groups and take
“resale value” and “promotion” less important.

14.  Attitudes and beliefs also vary depending on
the ease of access of a particular car brand.
Romanian consumers seemed to have strong
beliefs system towards imported cars as they
prefer to purchase. This is because they have
past experience toward the car they brought and
drives. Another belief is that half of people
quizzed buy Audi, BMW or Mercedes because of
the quality, safety standards, personal preference
and other things that make 'me' want to buy the
car for 'myself'.

15. References:
 Kotler and Armstrong (2010)- “Principles of
Marketing”
 http://www.academia.edu/1238098/Buying_behav
ior_of_customers_at_MBA_MARKETING_PROJ
ECT_REPORT
 http://umu.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:142148/FULLTEXT01.
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