Discuss the Cultural Factors Influencing Buyer Behaviour

Cultural Factors (Characteristics)
The marketer must understand the role played by the buyer’s culture, subculture and social
class.
(a) Culture – Culture is a society’s personality. It is the sum total of learned beliefs, values and customs that serve to direct and regulate the consumer behaviour of members of a particular society. It affects a person’s wants and behaviour. Beliefs and values are guides for consumer behaviour.
Customs are usual and accepted ways of behaving.
The impact of culture on society is so natural and so ingrained that its influence on behaviour is rarely noted. Yet culture offers order, direction and guidance to society members in all phases of human problem solving.
Growing up in a society a child learns the basic values, perceptions, wants and behaviours from
the family and other important cultural institutions e.g. different cultures assign different
meanings to colour. White is usually associated with purity and cleanliness in Western
communities. However it can signify death in Asian countries.
Also according to Taiwan culture, a man puts on green cloths to signify his wife has been
unfaithful.
(b) Subculture – Subculture is a distinct cultural group that exists as an identifiable segment
within a larger, more complex society. It includes nationalities, religions, racial groups, age
subcultures, gender subcultures and geographic regions. Many subcultures make up important
market segments and marketers often design products tailored to their needs e.g. the Black
Americans in the United States are strongly motivated by quality and selection. They place
more importance on brand names and are more brand loyal.
Sub cultural analysis enables the marketer to focus on sizeable and natural market segments.
The marketer must determine whether the beliefs, values and customs shared by the members
of a specific subgroup make them desirable candidates for special marketing attention.
Subcultures are hence relevant units of analysis for market research.
(c) Social Class is a continuum or a range of social positions on which each member of the
society may be placed. It is the division of members of a society into a hierarchy of distinct
status classes, so that members of each class have relatively the same status and members of all other classes have either more or less status. Social classes are society’s relatively permanent and ordered divisions whose members share similar values, interests and behaviours e.g. of social class: upper class, middle class, lower class.
Social class is determined by many factors like income, occupation, education, wealth and other
variables. Marketers are interested in social class because people within a given social class
tend to exhibit similar buying behaviour. Social classes show distinct product and brand
preferences in areas like clothing, home furnishings, automobiles etc.

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Titany answered the question on November 3, 2021 at 10:56