Social Factors - Family-1

Today we continue our discussion on one important social factor and which is a family. Traditionally, it has been the wife’s role to purchase food, clothing and other household sundries, while the husband played a dominant role in the purchase of automobiles and life insurance. But with the emergence of the working woman, these lines of traditional role demarcation have been getting increasingly blurred. Husbands now have to shoulder a greater part of the household duties while women are asserting themselves in areas so far treated as the husband’s domain. Thus, the same decision, in different families may be made either by the husband or wife, or both may have an equal voice. Children are also beginning to exert their influence on the family’s purchase decision. This is especially true in case of products such as television, stereo music systems, records, personal computers, etc. where the children are likely to have more updated information about various brands and product attributes.

Commenting on the consumer behavior trends in the hi-fi stereo music today, Vice-president of Peico Electronic (Consumer electronics division) said, “It is teenagers who select sets, and their papers just buy them” (as reported in ‘India Today’ July 31, 1987).

In our next post we will discuss on other social factors like Roles, Status, Group norms etc.

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Social Factors - Family

As our talk on social factors we continue our discussion on one important factor and that is Family. The family is the most important of all these groups and we shall discuss it in detail. The family, as a unit, is an important consumer for many products which are purchased for consumption by all members. It is a source of major influence on the individual members’ buying behavior. We can identify two families which shape an individual’s consumption behavior. One is the family of orientation that is the family in which you are born and consists of your parents, brothers and sisters. It is from parents that we imbibe most of our values, attitudes, beliefs and purchase behavior patterns. Long after an individual has ceased to live with his parents, their influence on the sub-conscious mind still continues to be great. In India, where children continue to live with their parents even after attaining adulthood, the latter’s influence is extremely important.

The second type of family is the family of procreation consisting of the consumer’s spouse and children. Within the family, different members play different roles. Marketers are interested in finding out exactly the role played by individual members so that they can appropriately design their promotion strategy to suit these differing roles.

Social Factors - Consumer Behavior

We are talking consumer behavior in our blog. In our previous talk we talked different factor effecting consumer behavior. We talked Personality, income, Education and occupation, family life cycle as factor having effect on consumer behavior. Today we are going to talk about Social factors.

Social factors also have effect on consumer behavior. Social factors include Life-Style, Reference Groups, Family, Roles, Status, Group norms, Conformity etc. Today we talk on Life Style as social factor effecting consumer behavior.


Life-Style
Life-styles are defined as patterns in which people live, as expressed by manner in which they spend money and time on various activities and interests. Life-style is a function of our motivations, learning, attitudes, beliefs and opinion, social class, demographic factors, personality etc. While reading this unit, you are playing role of a student. But at the same time you also have your career, family and social roles to play. The manner in which you blend these different roles reflects your life-style.

Life-style is measured by a technique known as psychographics. It involves measuring consumers’ responses to Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO), along with collecting information on demographic factors. Different individual’s responses are collected and analyzed to find distinctive life-style groups. Based on the AIO technique, different life-styles have been identified and described. The different life-styles are then used for market segmentation, product positioning and for developing promotion campaigns, including new products.

Learning - Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior we are taking here as a part of Insurance CRM Software and agency management system. We talk Perception in our past posts. Today we are going to talk Learning as important aspect of consumer behavior.

Learning

A new born infant’s sucking at the feeding bottle is instinctive behavior, but a five-year old clamouring for chocolate or chewing gum is the result of learned behavior. Much of an adult’s human behavior is learned behavior.

This is a very significant fact for marketers, because it implies that consumers can be made to learn the desired behavior through interplay of motives, stimuli, cues, responses and reinforcements. A housewife has the need for cutting down the time she spends for cooking in the kitchen. When this need is strong enough to propel her to take action it becomes a motive. The motive is directed towards the stimulus object - a pressure cooker. The stimuli are the various advertisement about the product which she sees and hears. Cuse are minor stimuli that determine when, where and how the hosewife responds.

We talk more on Learning in our next post.


ref: Insurance CRM, Insurance SFA Software, agency management software

Importance of Consumer Behavior

To successfully market to different market segments and for a successful marketing campaign management the marketing manager needs appropriate marketing strategies which he can design only when he understand the factors which account for those differences in consumer behaviors and tastes.

In today’s world of rapidly changing technology, consumer tastes are also characterized by fast changes. To survive in the market, a firm has to be constantly innovating and understand the latest consumer trends and tastes. Consumer behavior provides invaluable clues and guidelines to marketers on new technological frontiers which they should explore. For example, Mobile Phones, Lap Tops, LCD Monitors, etc.

Consumer behavior is a process, and purchase forms one part of this process. There are various endogenous psychological and exogenous environmental factors which influence this process. All these factors and the type of influence which they exert on an individual’s consumption behavior can be understood and analyzed.

ref:
customer relationship management

Consumer Behavior---Introduction

Leadorganizer and Lead Management are heart of any customer relationship, agency management system and marketing strategies. Leadorganizer means how to manage your leads. Businesses must have leadorganizer or lead management software to manage their leads. What is a lead? A Lead is a prospect for any business. It is very important for marketing executive/management to understand prospect requirements and consumer behavior. First let us understand consumer behavior.

‘What’ products and services do we buy, ‘why’ do we buy, ‘how often’ do we buy, from ‘where do we buy, ‘how do we buy, etc. are the issues which are dealt with in the discipline of consumer behavior. Consumer behavior can be defined as those acts of individuals (consumers) directly involved in obtaining, using, and disposing of economic goods and services, including the decision processes that precede and determine these acts. Just by human nature, consumers can be spontaneous, unpredictable, and selfish.

One thing that we have in common is that we are all consumers. In fact everybody in this world is a consumer. Everyday of our life we are buying and consuming an incredible variety of goods and services. However, we all have different tastes, likes and dislikes and adopt different behavior patterns while making purchase decisions. One may preferred to use colgate toothpaste, Dove soap, Head & Shoulder shampoo while your spouse may prefer another type for same requirement. Similarly, you may have a certain set of preferences in food, clothing, books, magazines, recreational activities, forms of savings and the stores from where you prefer to shop, which may be different not only from those of your spouse but also your friends, neighbors and colleagues. Each consumer is unique and this uniqueness is reflected in the consumption behavior and pattern and process of purchase. The study of consumer behavior provides us with reasons why consumers differ from one another in buying and using products and services. Customers and their behaviors comprise of many attributes and differentials. These differences are not just associated with demographics, groups or any one particular item. There is a complex development of behaviors that exist in the consumer markets.

In the world we live today, businesses and top Marketing executives must understand what differentiates their companies or their products from others and must understand the needs of the consumers in their markets. If they able to understand their product and consumer’s need, than it’s very easy for them to develop a strategic plan and create a market niche and develop their customer base with very good customer relations. Customer Relationship Management can help them to take competitive advantage in the market. Customer Relations depend on understanding the customer and their reactions to the environment which will at last prolong the life of customer relationship between company and their customers.


Understanding the customer need can be a starting point for majority businesses. There are possibilities of gap occurs between customers expectation and what businesses think customers expect. It result into overlook or not understanding customer's perceptions and real requirement.

ref: agency management software

CRM

What is CRM?

There are three aspects of CRM(Customer Relationship Management) which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:

• Operational - automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative



• Collaborative - direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative



• Analytical - analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes

Operational
Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.
One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company over time without having to repeat the history of their interaction each time.Many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call center agents.

Collaborative
Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone or SMS.The objectives of collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements.

Analytical
Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:

• Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimise marketing effectiveness


• Design and execution of specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, retention


• Analysis of customer behavior to aid product and service decision making (e.g. pricing, new product development etc.)


• Management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis
  Prediction of the probability of customer defection.

Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics.

Key functionalities of Any CRM:--

A typical CRM system is subdivided into three basic sub modules:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Service

More on Functionalities of CRM come next time.

WHY CRM ?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the way in which businesses acquire, document, and assess their potential customers, and maintain relationships with their clientele. CRM systems aid businesses in scheduling and maintaining their clients in order to build a long lasting and trusting business relationship more efficiently than ever before. Without such a system, any businesses would constantly be rewriting the same information on different documents.

With a CRM system, fields are automatically populated by the information that is repetitive (Name, D.O.B., etc.) such that agents save vast amounts of time and energy on these forms, time and energy that is then reassigned to attaining new cases.

Reference:

1)http://en.wikipedia.org

2)http://www.leadorganizer.net