Page 73 - DMGT408DMGT203_Marketing Management

Marketing Management/Essentials of Marketing

Notes Stage of Information Search

After need arousal, the behaviour of the consumer leads towards collection of available
information about various stimuli i.e. products and services in this case from various sources for
further processing and decision-making. Depending upon the intensity of need discrepancy and
urgency of the problem, an individual reaches two states. The first state is called heightened
attention where the consumer becomes more receptive to the information regarding the products
and services he needs. He becomes alert to information related to his need as well as on
alternatives about their gratification. If a consumer needs to purchase a television, he will pay
more attention to TV advertisements. He keeps remembering the remarks made by friends and
associates about TVs. In this case he is slowly collecting the information through an ongoing or
passive information search process.
If need is more intense and the problem is urgent, the individual enters a state of active information
search in which he tries to collect more information about the product, its key attributes, qualities
of various brands and about the outlets where they are available. His information search is
direct and is also observable through his behaviour.
The first source of consumer information is the internal source. The consumer searches for any
relevant product information from his memory box. If the information is not available and in
the case of supporting available information from internal source for making a purchase decision
he may collect information from external sources. External sources for desired information can
be grouped into four categories.

Personal Sources (family, friends, neighbors and peer group)
Commercial Sources or Market Dominated Sources (advertisements, salesmen, dealers
and company owned sales force)

Public Sources (mass media, consumer rating organizations, trade association publications)
Experiential Sources (handling, examining and using the product)
At this stage the consumer is actively involved in the buying process and pays attention to the
product. However, if he loses interest during this involvement, his attention will be diverted
and the buying-decision process will break down.

Example: Suppose a housewife requires washing aid. She may look for further
information about these machines once she becomes aware of such machines. The kind of
information she may look for are the alternative washing machines available in the market
place, their relative prices, operational efficiency and warranty and service facilities.

Stage of Alternative Evaluation

Once interest in a product(s) is aroused, a consumer enters the subsequent stage of evaluation of
alternatives. The evaluation stage represents the stage of mental (cognitive) and emotional
(affective) trial of various product alternatives. During this stage, the consumer assigns relative
value-weights to different products/brands on the basis of accumulated stock of product
information and draws conclusions about their relative potential for giving satisfaction to his
needs. When the consumer uses objective choice criteria, it is known as cognitive evaluation. In
the case of using emotional reasons for evaluating the alternatives, we call this as affective
evaluation. Consumers evaluate brands by using either or both the criteria in purchase situation.

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