Consumer behavior refers to how people purchase, use, and dispose of products and services. Understanding consumer behavior is important for retailers. There are several factors that influence retail shoppers, including the range of merchandise, convenience, travel time, socioeconomic factors, and life stage. The consumer decision making process involves need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase behavior. Market research helps retailers understand demographic data, consumer spending patterns, and evaluate customer satisfaction. Common market research methods used by retailers are focus groups, observation, and customer profiling.

1. Understanding The Retail
Consumer
- Acharya Bangalore B-School
Aishwarya Shirodkar &
Maya Pareek (PGDM)

2. What is Consumer Behavior?
The activities that people undertake when obtaining,
consuming and disposing of products and services.
The behavior that the customers display in searching
for, purchasing, using, evaluating, disposing of
products and services that they expect will satisfy
their needs.

3. The rise of the consumer age
The age of
the
wholesaler
The age of
the
manufactur
er
The age of
the retailer
The age of
the consumer

4. Need for Understanding the consumer behavior
 Understanding how the need the need for a product and
service was determined
 Understanding how information was sought by the customer
 The process of evaluation of various process
 The payment process
 The post purchase behavior

5. Factors influencing the
Retail Shopper

6. 1. Range of Merchandise
• It is the most important reason for customers to
patronise a particular outlet.
• Drawing a customer to the retail outlet may be easy,
but converting the customer into a buyer and
retaining the customer over a period of time largely
depends on the quality and the range of merchandise
offered by the store.
• This plays an important role with regard to
merchandise like durables, books and music, apparel,
lifestyle products, etc.

7. 2.Convenience of shopping at a particular
outlet:
• Convenience is fast gaining prominence in the world
of organised retail.
• Particularly for items like groceries, medicines, etc.

8. 3. Time to travel
• The time required to reach a particular retail outlet is
again far becoming a critical factor (especially for
metro cities).
• This is one of the main reasons which has led to rise
in online retailing & the formation of various retail
formats like departmental stores, malls, drug stores,
supermarkets, etc. approaching as close as possible
to the customers.

9. 4.socio-economic factors
• Today India is a nation with a large middle class and
a youth population which is happy spending and a
steady growth rate of GDP.
• The socio-economic background of the consumer
largely determines his/her lifestyle.
• And this in turn influences the kind of stores the
consumer will be comfortable shopping in.
• The consumers buying behaviour is largely
influenced by culture. Eg. Asian culture is very
different from Western culture.

10. • Therefore the retailer has to clearly understand the
needs of the consumer to determine the right kind
of merchandise in order to fulfil his needs.

11. 5. Stage of the family life cycle:
● This factor also largely influence the customer
needs
• Eg. The needs of a young bachelor will be different
from the needs of a family with children in their
teens, which will again be different from the
requirements of an elderly retired couple.
• The retailer needs to be clear about the target
market that he is catering to, as he cannot be
everything to everyone.

12. The customer decision making process
Need recognition
Information search
Evaluation of alternatives
Purchase decision
Post purchase behavior

13. Stage I. Identification of a Need for the
product or services
This arises when the consumer becomes aware of his
need of a particular product or service.
Triggered by Internal or External stimuli.

14. Stage II. Search for Information
 The second step involves gathering information on how to
solve the problem.
 INFORMATION SOURCE:
-Personal
-Commercial
-Public
-Experiential
 SEARCH DYNAMICS: By gathering information the consumer
learns about competing brands and their features

15. Stage III. Evaluating Alternatives
The consumer sees each product as a bundle of
attributes with varying abilities to deliver the benefits.
The attributes of interest to buyers vary by products

16. Stage IV. The Purchase Decision
At this stage, the decision is made first whether to
buy or not.
Key factors influencing consumer behavior:
-Personality
-Lifestyle
-Culture
-Social Class
-Family and Household Influences

17. Stage V. Post-purchase Behavior
 After the purchase, the consumer might experience certain
things from noticing features or hearing favorable things
about the brands and will be alert to information that
supports his/her decision.
 Post-purchase satisfaction
 Post-purchase actions
 Post-purchase uses and disposal

18. Market Research:
Any market research activity deals with the following logical
steps:
• Collection of data
• Analysis of the data collected
• Deriving conclusions on the basis of the data collected.

19. Information collected by way of market research can
either be:
• Primary data – The data that the retailer can use for a
specific purpose i.e. Demographic data and
Consumer data.
• Secondary data – The data that is available in the
market or within the organisation and which can be
used by the retailer.

20. Internal sources : Sales figures, company reports,
customer complaints, etc.
External sources : Government statistics, trade
information, research done by commercial research
agencies & financial institutions.

21. I. Research prior to setting of an retail
store:
Demographic Data :
• Population
• GDP & PPP
• Disposable income
• Age of the Population
Consumer data:
• Spending patterns
• Trends in urbanisation
• Consumer behaviour

22. II. Research after setting up to a retail
store:
 The research can help the retailer in the following areas:
• Evaluating the customer satisfaction with the existing range
of products and services.
• Generating Ideas for and developing new products.
• Evaluating the acceptability of the products and pricing of
new products.
• Understanding the customer profiles.

23. Methods commonly used by retailers:
1. Focus group
2. Accompanied observation
3. Profiling customers

24. Thank You