Consumption Behavior

The American Marketing Association defines consumer behavior as “the dynamic interaction of affect, cognition, behavior, and the environment by which human beings conduct the exchange aspects of their lives” (Bagozzi, 2018). That is to say that consumer behavior involves the thoughts and feelings people experience and the actions during consumption processes. (Constantinos et al., 2019). Consumer behavior is dynamic because the feelings, thinking and actions of each consumer are constantly changing. One of the tools that revolutionize the way people search for information about product and services is the internet by which people with a computer can just have a click for deciding what to buy or not. Therefore, marketers for ongoing consumer research and analysis to keep abreast of important trends have to consider that consumers and their environments are constantly changing.

To date, marketers have more challenging tasks to develop marketing strategies. Strategies that work in one market may fail in other markets. To create more value for customers and stay profitable, many companies have to innovate constantly, due product life cycles are shorter than before. This means to create new products, new versions of existing products, new brands, and new strategies from them. The more marketers know about the interaction of what product and brand mean to consumers, what must do to purchase and use them, what influences shopping, and consumption, the better they can satisfy consumer needs and wants and create value for them. For this reason, professionals in marketing place an emphasis on that consumer behavior also involves interactions. An example could be that the middle-income consumers are shrinking and low-and high-income groups are increasing, and the results of these changes affects consumer thoughts, feelings, and actions, and of course have to be considered in a marketing strategy (Kyeongheui and Jongwon, 2019)

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Consumer behavior also involves exchanges. People give up something of value to others and receive something in return; in other words this is how the market of products and services work, exchanging between buyers. Another important factor to understand consumer behavior is the environment, which is everything external to people that influence on what they think, feel and do.

It includes social stimuli, such as the actions of other in cultures, subcultures, social classes, reference groups, and families, that influence consumer. It also includes other physical stimuli, such as stores, products, advertisements, and signs that can change consumers’ thoughts, feeling, and actions (Peter & Olson, 2011).

Generally, consumer behavior is based in two fundamental ideas according to the identity theory. The first one is that people put forward to consume products and take actions to achieve identities consistent with their optimal self-images. Hence consumers’ relationship with brands could be based on the contexts that are central to the individual self-concept. The second one says that there is no just one global identity that people put in practice, but multiple identities, triggered or activated according to each individual environment. A number of contextual factors like a set of variable alternatives or attribute values and task factors such as time pressure are subject to the consumers’ choices processes and outcomes (Ratneshwar, Glen & Huffman, 2012). Details are illustrated in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2. 3 Hierarchical model of consumer goals Source: Ratneshwar, Glen & Huffman (2012)

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The life themes and values are defined as personal ideas of being, and represents the highest goal level. Life project are defined as the construction and maintenance of key life roles and identities. Current concerns are defined as activities, tasks or quest in which an individual want to be engaged in the short time. Consumption intentions are defined as individuals’ aims and desires to engage in particular product consumption and use behaviors. Benefits sought are defined as the consequences that are desired from ownership, usage, and disposal of a product. Feature preference are defined as preferred product features levels or values as stated in concrete physical or financial terms.

Continuing with the dynamic way that consumers mold their preferences at the moment of buying goods and services, the global communication is assuming to create homogeneous and global culture. Consumer behavior around the world is formed by a set of consumption-related symbols such as product categories, brands that are very significant for the people. For example, sports has another big of influence in consumption behaviors, and many nations have their preference sports, like New Zealand is rugby, in the Netherlands, France and Spain cycling is an important sport, in Malaysia badminton is very popular, and maybe football (soccer) can be considered as the most popular sport around the globe, even though it is by no means as popular in the United States, as it is in Europe or Latin America. Football even varies within Europe from 49 % in the United Kingdom to 65 % in Portugal. Belgians are more interested in tennis with 60

% of the population, and so on (Hildebrand et al., 2019). Music is also a big field that influence consumption behavior. Local music has gained market share throughout most of the world. Local films are increasing in many European markets, in Germany 26.6 % of cinema attendance choose nationals films (Zeeshan, 2013). For many countries instead of getting wrap by the globalization or homogenization, they stay more attach to their local culture and try to keep alive their own identities.

Human behavior components are summarized as what they (people) are, what people think about what sort of person are, how people feel, think, learn and what they do. According to the elements included in the definition of consumer behavior (affect, cognition and behavior), marketers have to understand the influence of culture on consumer behavior; they have to add culture in many components of human behavior, The components are illustrated in the Figure 2-4, which represents the cultural components of people according to their attributes and processes as consumers, and the cultural elements of behavior in consumer behavior domains. Culture influence

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wealth, but in turn of influencing culture, income is putting in a separate box, which interacts with the culture of consumers.

Figure 2. 4 A framework of Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior.

Source: Kim & Park (2019)

Culture is what makes people stick together. It represents human community, its individual and social organization. Without culture, it will be difficult for people to live among one another.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (Marieke, 2014) views culture as a set of control mechanism of rules, plans, recipes and instructions for the governing behavior. People are conditioned by their sociocultural environment to act in certain manners. Individuals cannot be separated from culture;

neither can culture be separated from the historical context. What memory is to individuals is culture to society. It concerns attitudes, norms, shared beliefs, roles, and values found among speakers of a particular language who share the same historical timeline in a specific piece of land.

These share components of subjective culture are generally transferred from generation to generation. Moreover, culture can also be described according to specific characteristics or categorized into value categories or dimensions of national culture. The most common dimension used for ordering societies is their degree of economic evolution or modernity, from traditional to

15 modern.