Consumer Decision Making Process

All right, so as marketers, to be effective and to be successful at what we do

one of the main things we need to understand is our customer. And for most businesses

when we say customer, what we mean is the consumer or the individual

So an important task for us is to understand the consumer decision-making process

Let's look at the steps involved here. First, you have need recognition. And this is when a person

decides, hey, you know, I need more of this, or I would like to have something that would do this

or sometimes it's even before that where the person just says, I don't like this about my life

or my situation. So that's what we mean when we say need recognition. The next step is information

search, and this is where we go looking for a solution. If it's, hey, I'm hungry, I want a snack

information search might mean just going and opening the refrigerator. On the other hand, if it's a situation that's unfamiliar to us and we don't know what solutions are out there

we may have to do a great deal of information search just to learn what kinds of solutions are available The next step is the evaluation of alternatives and this is after we have some idea about options that we have available to us We

need to decide which one is best, and that can take a long time in some

situations, again like an unfamiliar situation where we don't really know the

products, or it can be a very quick, which one do I feel like having right now

The next step is to make the purchase and that's pretty straightforward

The final step is post-purchase evaluation. This is when we've made a purchase, we've bought a product

we get home or wherever we're going to use it. Maybe it's in the store, it could be that kind of situation

but it's after we have made our purchase we decide, was that a good purchase, did that product meet our needs effectively

And then from there, we can either engage in some really positive behaviors like word of mouth

or we can decide that that was a bad decision, and we can choose that we will never make that decision again

Those are the kinds of things that come out of post-purchase evaluation. Altogether, this represents the consumer decision-making process, which is, again, important for us as marketers to understand