Consumer Behavior
The term consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs. Consumer behavior focuses on how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources (time, money, effort) on consumption related items.
Consumer behavior has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Today, consumers can order online many customized products. Students choosing a university no longer rely on receiving prospectuses through the post; instead, they have online access to all the pertinent information about a university’s courses and teaching staff and, in some cases, can visit, virtually, actual classes.
Marketing Concept
The marketing concept is the philosophy that firms should analyze the needs of their customers and then make decisions to satisfy those needs, better than the competition. The marketing concept is an integral part of the marketing plan. Success is directly correlated to what the customer wants.
Five orientations philosophical concepts to the marketplace have guided and continue to guide organizational activities:
1. The production concept
2. The product concept
3. The selling concept
4. The marketing concept
5. The Social marketing concept
Interrelationship between Consumer Behavior and marketing Concept
The field of consumer behavior is rooted in the marketing concept, a business orientation that evolved in the 1950s through several alternative approaches towards doing business referred to, respectively, as the production concept, the product concept and the selling concept.
The production concept assumes that consumers are mostly interested in product availability at low prices; its implicit marketing objectives are cheap, efficient production and intensive distribution. This orientation makes sense when consumers are more interested in obtaining the product than they are