Marketing Research Case Studies
Week 4 – Consumer behavior
Each day, consumers are faced with numerous small consumption decisions, each of which is crucial to educate marketing research. Evaluating consumer behavior answers not only the question, what consumers buy, but also who, how and where. For a company which is trying to promote a product, it is crucial to understand why, how and where consumers are deciding to buy their product. This information is needed in order to design marketing tools that better influence consumer behavior and target consumers directly through precise messages. Yet, analyzing consumer behavior can be a difficult task for any company because there is often limited information available on why the consumer is deciding to behave in a certain way. This is because consumers oftentimes do not know themselves what affects their purchase decision, especially in the area of FMCG – fast moving consumer goods. A consumer might, on the one hand, put significant thought into which specific car to buy, but has on the other hand limited information on why he or she decided to pick up a certain brand of milk in the supermarket (B2B Whiteboard 2012).
There are various situations, where consumers react different than what one would expect – for example in the purchasing of ethical products or luxury goods. Ethical products, as a first example, often show promising result in pre-launch marketing surveys. This means when consumers are asked whether environmentally friendly raw materials or production methods are relevant, they tend to answer positively. While this would normally indicate positive consumption decisions, for ethical products the reality often looks significantly different. Scholars have called this phenomenon the attitude-behavior gap. Yet, further and more in-depth research is still needed to find out how companies can overcome this inconsistency between expected and actual consumer behavior (Eckhardt et al. 2010).
The second example is the success of luxury goods based on their image. Similar to every other type of good, customers are only buying a luxury product if they assess that the product value to them is worth the price that is asked. Yet, recent research into the relationship of consumer behavior and power suggests that this might not always be the case. When a certain amount of power – especially in relation to societal status – is associated with a product, the normal rules of consumer behavior seem to matter less. Despite enormous prices, consumers are willing to ignore their own value for money evaluation for some luxury goods, because they offer a significant gain in power associated with owning this specific brand. Similar to the problems with ethical goods, this area still lacks more in-depth research into how companies can make better use of the relationship between power and consumer behavior (Rucker et al. 2012).
Week 5 – Price Strategy & Distribution Strategy
A company’s pricing strategy answers the question, what a product is worth, and therefore represents a crucial part of the marketing mix. Setting a price for …
