Introduction
Background Information
Many social science researchers and practitioners have been interested in the concept and field of consumer behavior. There is a lack of consensus on what constitutes consumer behavior as scholars define the image differently. The term has been described as “the actions and decision processes of people who purchase goods and services for personal consumption” (Engel et al., 1982, as cited in Rajani & Nakhat, 2019, p. 378). The concept encompasses all actions an individual, group, or organization take when buying, utilizing, and disposing of a particular product or service. In their journal article, Buerke et al. (2017) explain that consumer behavior researchers focus on examining the actions and decisions consumers take in the marketplace and their underlying motivations. Research in this area focuses on purchasing activities related to who and where and how consumption and use experience is found, including symbolic associations and the distribution of goods within families or individual units, and disposal activities.
There is a general consensus on the importance of studying and understanding consumer behavior, particularly the process and factors underlying purchase intentions. The consumer buying process encompasses the set of activities and decisions an individual takes before, during, and after purchasing an item in exchange for money (Rajani & Nakhat, 2019). It starts when a person recognizes a need that has to be met then proceeds to search for information about the requirement—the research yields several alternatives which are evaluated to determine the best decision. After buying a good or service, the individual may engage in post-purchase behaviors such as recommending the product to a friend or family member (Rajani & Nakhat, 2019). Understanding factors that influence people to choose, purchase, use, or disregard particular products or services can help marketers recognize goods with higher demand and preference and how to present them to their target clients.
However, many practitioners in the marketing professions find it difficult to understand and harness the value of consumer behavior. The scope of consumer behavior research today focuses on “understanding how buying decisions are made and how goods or services are purchased or experienced” (Chrysochou, 2017, p. 410). People decide what to buy, often based on several factors such as disposable income and budget. You can change your budget preferences based on various factors such as income earnings. Research on this particular area is essential because marketers in beverage-producing firms understand what affects people’s buying decisions. By understanding how individuals decide to buy beverages, marketers can fill the market gap and identify the required brands and the outdated ones. Insights from these studies can help marketers determine how their products can be presented to maximize the impact of their advertising and promotional campaigns. Understanding consumer purchase behavior involves reaching and involving your customers and converting them for your purchase. For businesses, an understanding of their target customers is vital because they can learn more about their target market. This information enables companies to analyze their current trajectory and see how they can more effectively cater to their clients. This helps them boost sales, increase income, and improve profitability.
The advent of the internet has had a significant impact on the attitudes and behavior of people worldwide. The emergence of web-based commerce and online shopping have challenged traditional knowledge and understanding about the consumer buying process. Rahman et al. (2018) note that “with more and more consumers become increasingly familiar with the Internet and its benefit, online shopping is becoming popular and getting preference among a group of consumers seeking better value proposition regarding information, convenience, cost, choice” (p. 2). Online stores feature enhanced descriptions of products and services through many formats such as text, photos, and multimedia. Most web-based retailers incorporate links for further information about their goods. These elements influence the five stages of the consumer buying process, including searching, purchasing, and using an item. Therefore, there is a strong need to examine the unique nature of online shopping behavior to inform research and practice in this particular area.
The Objective of the Study
The aim objective of this investigation will be to analyze the nature of online shopping behavior and establish how an understanding of this topic can inform and improve the marketing of products and services.
Research Questions
This study will focus on answering the following questions:
- What is the nature of online consumer behavior in young people?
- What factors affect online shopping among young people?
- How can research on online consumer behavior can benefit marketing?
Scope of the Study
The study will focus on young people’s shopping behaviors before, during, and after purchasing online products and services. The investigation will focus on this segment because young people constitute the majority of online shoppers and are increasingly experimenting with new ways of buying goods and services. The target population will comprise 50 college students who will be drawn using a simple random sampling method.
Literature Review
History Consumer Behavior Research
In the 1940s and 1950s, the so-called classical thought schools’ marketing was dominated by highly descriptive approaches and firmly based upon case studies using only occasional interviews. Two significant reports criticized marketing at the end of the 1950s because of the lack of methodological rigor, particularly the lack of adopting behavioral research methods that were mathematically oriented. The stage was designed to make marketing more interdisciplinary with an approach to consumer behavior. In the 1950s, marketing began to shift from economics to other disciplines, particularly behavioral studies such as sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology. This trend led to the customer being given new importance as an analytical unit (Chrysochou, 2017). New substantive know-how, such as opinion leadership, benchmarks, and brand loyalty, has also been added to the marketing field
The marketing discipline has shown increasing scientific advancement in theory development and testing processes by adding consumer behavior. The consumer’s behavior was greatly influenced in its early years by motivational research, which had increased customer understanding and was extensively utilized in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s by consultants in the advertising and psychology disciplines. Today, consumer behavior is considered an essential subsection for marketing and is included in nearly all undergraduate programs as a study.
Effect of Marketing Campaigns on Consumer Behavior
Marketing campaigns focus more on influencing consumer attitudes, perceptions, and buying decisions. If done correctly and regularly, they can convince existing and prospective customers to change brands or choose expensive alternatives with the right marketing message (Chrysochou, 2017). Research shows that millennials exhibit positive attitudes and more excellent purchase intentions for products featuring cause-related marketing (Partouche et al., 2020). These findings demonstrate that practical promotional activities have a significant impact on purchase decisions.
Customer Behavior Segmentation
The segmentation of customers and identification of buyers is always essential. Now that individualization and customer experience influence a company’s success, efficient segmentation is even more critical. Many companies that use customer segmentation say that they find it essential, so the segmentation technique needs to be found that clarifies and suits your business (Ballestar et al., 2018). During information search on a product or service, customers can disclose their behavior valuable insights into the advantages, features, values, usage cases, and problems that most motivate their purchasing decisions. If a customer values one or more gifts compared with the other, then these primary benefits are the motivating factors that drive that customer’s purchase decision.
The use of products or services is a common way of behavior to segment clients based on the frequency on which a client buys a product or service or interacts with it. User behavior can be a strong loyalty or churn indicator, and therefore a value for life (Ballestar et al., 2018). Loyal clients are the most precious assets of a company. They are less expensive to maintain, usually have the highest lifetime value, and can be brand proponents. By analyzing behavioral data, customers can be divided by their degree of loyalty to ensure marketers understand their needs. Ballestar et al. (2018) explain that buyer segmentation enables marketers to align communication and personalize conversion experiences at each stage. Also, it helps them discover phases in which custodians do not progress so that they can identify, even after purchase behaviors, the most significant obstacles and improvements.
Importance of Understanding Customer Behavior
The success of any business enterprise depends hugely on its clients. They strive to understand their customer behavior in order to find effective ways to attract and retain them and deliver tailor-made products and solutions (Partouche et al., 2020). The world of business is highly competitive; thus companies need to be aware of how customers buy for various reasons – emotional and logical – to meet their needs. Comprehensively and consistently understanding customers’ behavior allow firms to know their clients’ expectations. This awareness is essential in designing products that are valuable to customers and bring them closer to the business. Furthermore, this knowledge is critical to establishing a pricing point for specific customer segments and developing efficient promotional and stimulus schemes (Ballestar et al., 2018). Another benefit of understanding the client’s behavior is to enable marketers to take advantage of the behavior. It allows a company to formulate and reinforce its customer opinion, achieving its sales, profitability, and sustainable achievement goals.
No company could remain successful in today’s competitive business environment without meeting changing customer tastes and preferences. Companies that fail to invest in consumer research risk becoming complacent and losing existing clients and prospects to their competitors (Rajani & Nakhat, 2019). In this context, understanding customer behavior becomes integral to business success. Consumer insights can help companies improve their product development process by innovating and producing goods that match their customers’ needs and expectations. Therefore, business enterprises must be several steps ahead to keep pace with them and predict how customers will do in the future. They need a thorough understanding of their conduct to design and implement compelling marketing campaigns and deliver competitive market offerings.
They need to understand customer behavior steadily increases the importance of fulfilling customer requirements and desires. The random production of goods and services may waste time and resources for an undertaking based on assertions that customers may need. Even the best and most carefully produced products would be destroyed if customers do not value a product. People purchase a wide range of products for varying reasons. According to Tseng and Wei (2020), emotions have a significant role to play – if customers like a product/brand, even if similar brands were available on the market, they would pay a high price. Nuanced insights into client needs put the company in control – meaning that it can exploit customers’ behavior for its benefit by creating products that their markets love and building services based on customer feedback.
Understanding the customer’s behavior can help an enterprise develop its promotions, marketing, and other media. A firm can send its promotional material to such a customer by observing that the end-of-season sales and other discounts will be more likely to be bought by a particular customer. Tseng and Wei (2020) found that “marketing ads possessing higher media richness generally have a positive effect on consumer decision-making, because rich media conveys more information, but mobile ads with richer media imply higher costs for both the marketer and the audience” (p. 353). Understanding customer behavior would help a company differentiate between its customers; for example, teens look for new and trendy styles whenever they are developed. An officer might prefer comfort and sophistication and search for personality and kind of work styles. Therefore, what people want to express through products can be essentially the behavior of their customers.
Some buyers don’t have to buy for themselves. They can purchase for someone else who is the end-user of the product or service. In this case, a double benefit would be understanding customer behavior and understanding the customer and the user. A great experience would positively impact two different customer groups for these two people – that means the company can reach out to its customers and improve its ability to get closer to them. A company should also consider what products or services are consistently purchased and used by those groups. It would reduce the company’s focus and promote these particular segments more frequently for these groups.
Understanding the behavior of customers also means understanding what kind of information they need and might use. If customers follow the methods used, they would most likely gain information about who they think and what data they use for their purchase decisions; the chance of the company gaining benefit from the customers could significantly increase. Therefore, company success is not only a factor for manufacturing exceptional products or the latest ones. Unless a company understands its customer conduct, its efforts will be wasted, and its achievements will fail.
Research Gap
In the literature review, the topic almost touches the research area to determine the reasons that influence the consumer decision to buy any product. However, there is limited research on consumer behavior toward online shopping. As manifested in the literature review, a few studies have examined the nature online purchase decision-making process and its importance in marketing. Therefore, this study will attempt to fill this gap by exploring the nature of online shopping behavior and establishing how an understanding of this topic can inform and improve the marketing of products and services.
Research Methodology
This study aims to analyze the benefit of understanding consumer behavior in marketing different beverage brands. This research investigates, collects data, surveys, and analyzes collected data to answer the research questions. Through this study, the researcher will get detailed information about the benefits of understanding consumer behavior in beverages’ marketing brands.
Research Methods
Researchers use a wide range of research methods to examine consumer behavior. Some of the common approaches include customer surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. These techniques can enable business organizations to gain insight into consumer behavior. Researchers are increasingly using new techniques and technologies to gain more insight into why consumers act in specific ways. These newer methods include ethnographic and neuroscience research and experimental laboratory designs.
Anthropology is the source of ethnographic research or ethnography. But marketers use ethnographic research to investigate consumer trends and how the social context affects product choice, consumption and use, and cultural attitudes. Ethnographic research examines consumer behavior, not in an artificial environment such as laboratories but in natural settings (Mariampolski, 2016). Marketing uses various ethnographic research methods, including observed product usage, Day-in-the-life studies, Accompanied purchase or shop-along, Cultural studies, Mystery shopping, and multiple methodologies.
Research Design and Sampling Techniques
A descriptive survey design will be used to describe the natural phenomenon occurring with the data in question. It also allows the researcher to develop descriptive statistics that explain the link between understanding consumer behavior and market products. This study targets a population of 100 marketers of beverage-producing companies. Stratified and simple random sampling will select marketers of different beverage producing companies to attain a sample of 50 marketing personnel.
Data Collection Techniques
Questionnaires will be used to collect information from respondents. Information will be gathered by administering a questionnaire to different marketers from beverage-producing companies. Data will be filled in both qualitative and quantitative techniques by instructions provided in questioners. Only filled questionnaires will be collected back from marketers.
Data Analysis and Presentation
The collected data will be sorted, coded, and analyzed through descriptive statistics to summarize data and inferential statistics to establish the relationship between consumer behavior and marketing. Data collected will be calculated in percentages to establish how understanding consumer behavior benefits beverage production companies in terms of quality brands’ production. The findings will be presented in the line graph and histogram to create clear information on the study.
Conclusion
This study will investigate the nature of online shopping behavior and establish how an understanding of this topic can inform and improve the marketing of products and services. The findings of this study will be of great importance to marketing firms and professionals. Insights generated from this study may companies improve their product design and development by leveraging customer insights to create products and services that match their unique needs and preference. Furthermore, the results of this research may help business enterprises to align and shape their marketing to facilitate the achievement of growth through collective efforts. This study will also be a foundation for researchers to carry out their tasks in consumer behavior. They can use it to conduct investigations in the recommended production and marketing areas for further studies and use it as a reference source. This research will be of great importance to beverage producing firms as they will recognize the relationship between understanding consumer behavior and marketing of organization products. The industry will also be able to indicate organization profit maximization and marketing performance and respond appropriately. Moreover, beverage-producing firms will be in a place to set marketing policies.
References
Ballestar, M. T., Grau-Carles, P., & Sainz, J. (2018). Customer segmentation in e-commerce: Applications to the cashback business model. Journal of Business Research, 88, 407-414.
Buerke, A., Straatmann, T., Lin-Hi, N., & Müller, K. (2017). Consumer awareness and sustainability-focused value orientation as motivating factors of responsible consumer behavior. Review of Managerial Science, 11(4), 959-991.
Chrysochou, P. (2017). Consumer behavior research methods. In E. Gerard, W. Rolf, & L. Frank (Eds.), Consumer Perception of Product Risks and Benefits (3rd ed., pp. 409-428). Springer, Cham.
Partouche, J., Vessal, S., Khelladi, I., Castellano, S., & Sakka, G. (2020). Effects of cause-related marketing campaigns on consumer purchase behavior among French millennials. International Marketing Review.
Rahman, M. A., Islam, M. A., Esha, B. H., Sultana, N., & Chakravorty, S. (2018). Consumer buying behavior towards online shopping: An empirical study on Dhaka city, Bangladesh. Cogent Business & Management, 5(1), 1-22.
Rajani, V. T., & Nakhat, P. (2019). Consumer behavior in online shopping: What they think before they buy. Journal of Psychosocial Research, 14(2), 377-384. Web.
Tseng, C. H., & Wei, L. F. (2020). The efficiency of mobile media richness across different stages of online consumer behavior. International Journal of Information Management, 50, 353-364.