Buyer Behavior Research paper

Consumer behavior can be defined as “the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society” (Lars Perner).
A Consumers buyer behavior is influenced by 4 main factors: Cultural, Social, Personal, And Psychological. These factors influence consumers and their decisions, their product and brand preferences. Although many of these factors cannot be directly controlled by marketers, understanding of their impact is essential for capturing the markets, as well as competing with other companies. When purchasing any product, a consumer goes through a decision process, that has 5 main stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decisions and post purchase behavior.
All organizations and their marketing departments take into consideration that buyer behavior and the resulting purchase decision is influenced by cultural, social, personal and psychological factors. An understanding of the influence of these factors is essential for marketers, as it helps to develop suitable marketing appeal to the target customers.
The psychology of each individual considers the product or service in relation to own culture, attitude, and personal perception. Then consumer decides whether or not to purchase, the brand that he or she prefers, and other choices. So main personal factors include: age and life stage, occupation, life style, personality and self concept(Lars Perner).
Nowadays healthy lifestyle is becoming more and more popular, and many firms consider it to be one of the main factors in consumer behavior. So making and advertising healthy and useful products should be considered as good marketing strategy.
We can make a research that will: assess consumer knowledge and beliefs on health, diets and nutrition; analyze the influence of such information and sources of information; show the effect of health campaigns on purchase behavior.
According to the latest researches, nutritional labeling is found to affect the consumer purchase behavior significantly, it allows consumers to switch consumption away from “unhealthy” products toward “healthy”( P.H.K.Prathiraja).
We can make such a research to show if consumers’ ability to choose their diets depends on the information about the usefulness of the product.
100 consumers were selected in the supermarkets and asked several questions to learn their attitudes toward diet, health, and nutrition labels. According to this, 75.3% considered that nutritional information on food is vital for their purchasing decisions. Among the other factors influencing their shopping was price, quality, packaging, and brand. So the highest level of importance was about nutritional labeling on food products. 23% of the respondents stated that they always read the nutrition labels, and 62 % said they sometimes read it while only 2% said that they never look at the label. This research shows that nutrition information is an important factor that consumers use in purchasing. 65 % of the respondents interviewed said that health consciousness is the main reason to buy food products with nutritional labeling. So if we like to make the advertising of the Cadbury products, which are mainly chocolate and cocoa products, we should make our advertising based on the facts of their nutritional value. We should stress that Cadbury uses only high-quality chocolate and cocoa, and according to medical tests chocolate is good for our health.
Cadbary company always looking at how it can find new ways to help people understand and make more informed choices about the products. This includes providing more information about products, their ingredients and nutritional values, including guideline-daily amounts. Cadbury is introducing a global standard for the provision of nutrition information on its products – product labeling.
Nowadays, people are seeking for durability, value, and safety in the product they wish to buy. A customer’s wish has to be identified, and his expectations must be matched, and this can be related to any product. Identifying this is the first step towards achieving success, and the rest depends on the performance of the product (Lars Perner, 4). It concerns questions pertaining to the consumer’s awareness on nutritional label information, the effect of nutrition labeling on buying.

 
References
Lars Perner, Ph.D. (2006) Consumer behavior: the psychology of marketing. Department of Marketing
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
P.H.K.Prathiraja (2003). Impact of Nutritional Labeling on Consumer Buying Behavior. Sri Lankan Journal of Agricultural Economics. Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003.
Cadbury nutrition labelling global standard. Official company cite