These are common individual characteristics that can influence one’s behaviour or decisions.
They include the buyer’s age and life cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle,
personality and self concept.
(a) Age and Lifecycle Stage
Marketers often define their target markets in terms of the life-cycle stage and develop
appropriate products and marketing plans for each stage.
b) Economic Situation
Product choice is greatly affected by ones economic circumstances. People’s economic
circumstances consist of:
Their spendable incomes (level, stability and time pattern)
- Savings
- Assets
- Debts
- Borrowing power and
- Attitude toward spending verses savings, among others
Economic situation of an individual affect his/her buying ability. A high income earner has more income to spend and a low income earner has little income to spend. Marketers of income sensitive goods watch trends in personal income, savings and interest rates. During economic
recession, marketers must re-price reposition or even redesign their products.
c) Lifestyle
Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interest and
opinions. Marketers classify people based on how they spend their money and time as follows:
Status oriented buyers – Base their purchases on the actions and opinions of others.
Action oriented buyers – Are driven by their desire for acting, risk taking and variety.
Principle oriented buyers – Consumers who buy based on their views of the world.
Based on lifestyle, consumers can also be classified as:
Actualisers – People with so many resources that they can indulge in any of the orientations
above.
Achievers – People with middle income and just enough resources. They strive to be actualisers
and are often status oriented.
Strivers – People with little resources and are principle oriented.
Strugglers – People with too few or no resources. They are often not included in any consumer
orientation.
Other life style classifications such as
a. Those interested in change
b. Followers
c. Traditionalists
d. Contented
e. Under achievers, etc.
Lifestyle study is used by marketers to design appropriate adverts for each class of consumers.
(d) Personality and Self-concept
Personality is the distinguishing psychological characteristic that leads to relatively consistent and lasting responses to one’s own environment.
Personality can be described as self-confident, dominant, social, defensive, adaptable and
aggressive.
Personality is useful in analyzing consumer behaviour for certain products e.g. coffee marketers have discovered that heavy coffee drinkers are highly sociable.
Titany answered the question on
November 3, 2021 at 11:04