Decision making done to solve a problem at hand, is called problem solving. Below is a chart demonstrating the systematic procedure that consumers go through (in their head) to choose the appropriate purchase to solve their problem.
Up to now we have talked about how consumers come to scrutinize everyhting in the market environment but we haven't yet discussed how consumers make decisions in the marketplace. One important thing to note is that human beings and therefore consumers, are never completely rational in making decisions. A completely rational individual would carefully scrutinize every product out there and all of its features and all of the features of every other substitute for each product before coming to a purchase decision. However this is impossible for a couple of reasons. First as we learned before, individuals have limited mental resources and also have limited free time. Marketers however, may use these facts to their advantage in the marketing environment.
There are two main types of mental processing an individual can do to
reach a decision about a problem at hand. The first type of processing is
called systematic processing . Systematic processing involves
in depth analysis and scrutinization of all stimuli in the environment
(including the persuasive arguments of the marketer). The other type of
mental processing is called heuristic processing , which involves
taking mental short-cuts or "rules-of thumb" to come to a decision. A
very popular heuristic that many people often take is the "like-agree"
heuristic that leads people to make the same decision as people that they
like did. One very famous example of marketers trying to get consumers to
use this heuristic is putting famous people (i.e. Michael Jordan for Nike)
in their advertisements.
Decision making done to solve a problem at hand, is called problem
solving. Below is a chart demonstrating the systematic procedure
that consumers go through (in their head) to choose the appropriate
purchase to solve their problem.
This chart comes from
University of Dayton Marketing 421--Advertising.
University of Oregon, Institute of Cognitive & Decision Sciences
The
Center for Computational Psychology
Consumer Decision Making Lecture on
Consumer Decision Making
Consumer Behavior College of Business
