Page 178 - DMGT506_CONSUMER_BEHAVIOUR

Unit 13: Consumer Decision-making Process

Preference Strategy Notes

Preference strategy is appropriate when the brand is part of the evoked set of consumers in the
target market and the approach to decision making involves extensive information search.
Consumers tend to consider several brands, a number of brand attributes and many information
sources. The marketer’s strategy needs to focus on providing important information, meaningful
and persuasive from the consumers’ point of view to result in the brand being preferred by
consumers in the target market.
To accomplish the marketer’s objective, the first decision involves developing a strong
positioning of the brand. Extensive advertising may be required to reach all possible sources to
communicate the desired position of the brand, even to those who do not purchase the brand but
are viewed as reliable sources of information. This might even involve encouraging independent
testing labs to test the brand, inviting experts to write articles about their independent evaluations,
incentives to sales personnel to recommend the brand, arranging displays and a well-designed
active or passive web site on the Internet is necessary.

Acceptance Strategy

This strategy focuses on the situation when the target consumers do not search for information
about the marketer’s brand. The basic objective of the marketer is to move the brand in the
evoked set of consumers, rather than try to “sell” the brand. The approach, however, is similar
to preference strategy in all other respects except that the major challenge is to attract consumers
or motivate them to learn about the marketer’s brand. This requires extensive attention-capturing
advertising. For example, many auto marketers offer an incentive to those who would visit
their showroom and test drive the model being promoted. This approach leads consumers to
seek information actively when a purchase situation arises.
13.1.3 Evaluation of Alternatives

Consumers’ evaluative criteria refer to various dimensions; features, characteristics and benefits
that a consumer desires to solve a certain problem. For example, a consumer’s evaluative criteria
for a laptop computer may include processor speed, operating system, memory, graphics, sound,
display, software included, cost and warranty, etc. However, for another consumer the set of
evaluative criteria may be entirely different from the same product.
Any product feature or characteristic has meaning for a consumer only to the extent that it can
provide a desired benefit. Consumers who want to avoid dental cavities would use the toothpaste
that contains fluoride in its formulation. For this particular consumer, fluoride content would
probably be the most important evaluative criterion. Fluoride feature is important because it
provides a desired benefit, otherwise it has no value. What is more important for marketers is
to stress upon – and convince consumers about – the benefit that a particular feature provides
rather than mentioning the feature only.
To evaluate different alternatives in the evoked set, the consumer examines products or brands
against the desired set of criteria, and also those that are not desired. Consumers use either
attitude-based choice that involves the use of general attitudes, impressions, beliefs, intuition,
or heuristics and form overall preferences about brands, or attribute-based choice that requires
the knowledge of specific attributes at the time of choosing a brand by comparing each brand
alternative on specific attributes. This attribute-based choice process is cumbersome and time
consuming. Generally, the importance of an optimal decision is related to the value of the
product under consideration and the consequence associated with a non-optimal decision.
Some consumers are inclined to simplify the evaluation process and weigh only price heavily or
only make the evaluation on the basis of a recognised brand name. It is important to appreciate

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 173