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Marketing Assignment Question
You are expected to discuss a product/service selection in relevance to consumer needs and motivation; personality and self-concept; consumer perception; consumer learning and involvement; and consumer attitude development and change.
You must apply the concepts and theories you have learned from your reading of the text to the selected product/service and consumer decision-making process and not just list or describe them.
Assignment Structure:
1. Provide a title page to your assignment with your name, student number, a name of the unit, name of the unit coordinator and word count.
2. Include a page with the table of contents.
3. Provide an executive summary in two or three paragraphs that gives an overview of your assignment.
4. Following the executive summary, your assignment should focus on sub-headings such as an introduction, body of the assignment, conclusion and references.
5. You can present a brief overview of the product/products/service that you have selected for the purpose of this assignment in the introduction.
6. Within the body of the assignment, you can include several internal factors and their impact in influencing consumers' decision-making process.
7. A Conclusion should relate to the summary of the whole assignment.
8. Include appropriate references by following proper referencing style (APA or Chicago-author).
9. Reference provided towards the end of the assignment should match with those that are provided throughout (in-text references) your assignment (for online sources, web links can be incorporated).
10. Please do not provide any bibliographic details.
11. Analysis of the assignment question should be appropriately linked with relevant theories that are used.
12. Please understand that all of your assignments will be submitted to 'turnitin' for originality check and also please do understand the policies that are related to plagiarism.
13. Finally, as the assessment components for this unit involves submission of two assignments, your assignments will be thoroughly checked and marked on the basis of the critical analysis of the content and the application of the various theories.
14. If you think that the content that you are trying to include in your assignment is exceeding the suggested word limit, you can provide some of the content as extra information (graphs, tables, photographs etc.,) in appendices (I am happy to go through them) towards the end of your assignment after the references.
Marketing Assignment Solution on External Consumer Choice Factors
Executive Summary
A consumer's decision-making process mainly includes several internal as well as external factors. The internal factors and their relevance in consumer decision making have already been discussed in the previous assignment. In this assignment, external factors and its influence on the decision making process is the prime focus. I consider various external factors and their impact on the decision making process. Further, with the help of recent related theoretical and empirical literature, I have tried to include some factors as most influencing relative to others in my example/product's purchasing decision making…
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Introduction
As mentioned in the previous assignment that, it is intuitive to experience a difference between intention to purchase and the product's final purchase. We go to the market to buy a product (suppose a LED) presuming certain product features, needs and requirement, but, when we search for the product or say in contact with the market, there are a number of factors (internal and external) which influence our buying decision making. As a result, we sometimes or most of the time, buy a purely different item which we presumed to have in our home. There can be various reasons for which we change our choice. It can be the price range, features of the product, convincing ability of the shopkeeper, service assurance or something else but, one thing is sure that all such factors in conjunction with the utility of the product and perception about the products affect our understanding that result into a different purchase…
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Choice of LED purchase, features and characteristics
- LED is a consumer durable item which is used for entertainment purpose. In the early days of introduction in the market, LED is assumed to be a luxury item and was under the reach of the affluent customer (Premium customers as a target). The intense competition between companies and rapid changes in technology brought changes in customer target as prices lowered and the middle-income class is the market.
- Purchasing decision of a LED depends on upon certain product features as well as customer's need, desire and expectations of the product. There are many companies available for LED and tried to position their brand in the market differently…
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External factors and consumer decision-making process from the perspective of consumer behaviour
The starting point to understand consumer behaviour is stimulus response model (Kotler, 2009, p. 153). This model includes marketing and other stimuli factors to have an impact on consumer choice and consumer psychology. Consumer choice is categorised in external (Culture and social) and internal factors. Here my focus is to discuss the external factors of consumer choice. Consumer choice combining with consumer psychology affects the buying decision-making process and process leads towards the purchase decision, i.e. product choice, brand choice, dealer choice etc…
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Cultural factors
Culture is one of the most fundamental factors of an individual's choice of products. Culture brings the set of values, perceptions, preferences, and behaviour which ultimately decides their selection patterns and choices (Kotler, 2009, p. 144).
Cultural factor is further subdivided into a subculture and social class. Subculture refers to the specific identification and socialisations.
Social class refers to the socioeconomic status of the family head. Different social classes have different requirements for the same product. For example, in our LED purchase decision, if we study across different social class, it is intuitive that upper class may like to purchase for listening to the news, middle class likes to watch films and TV program while lower class may go for sports and soap operas. Social class is an outcome of social stratifications. A social class exhibits individuals having same values, interests, income and choices. A particular social class has specific characteristics choices and wants from the product available…
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Relative Importance of various external factors in the purchase decision process
Till now I have explained the external factors and their influence on the decision-making process for the purchase of LED. Out of these factors, some could be relatively more important while other less important. Here the relative importance of the factors is considered. Here the explanation depicts the relevance of each factor and then decides the importance.
Subculture- out of various types of subcultures and their description, there is no type which can be considered as affecting the purchase decision process of LED. This factor is least affected as the product is linked to the need of entertainment and watching programs.
Social class- There are several types of LED available in different sizes and designs with distinct products features. These are provided to attract different social classes as a low-cost LED is meant to target lower class segment while premium big size LED with new innovative technology is priced higher and targets the upper-class customers. This factor seems to be most relevant here…
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Critical evaluation of factors affecting the decision-making process
The critical evaluation of factors relies on connecting the observable features and impacts on relevant theoretical aspects. Arguing the relative importance of external factors considered. The whole discussion and critical evaluation are given below.
Consumer decision making process as a model is given above in figure 1. Here, we have marketing stimuli and others as the input factors that help in problem recognition; information search, evaluation of alternatives, and purchase decision are processing variable which is affected due to external factors and post purchase behaviour can be considered as output variables. This model has an outcome in the form of product choice, brand choice and dealers choice. Out of various views of consumer decision making- cognitive model and emotional models are relevant her in the purchase decision of LED…
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Conclusion
In this paper, our main objective is to highlight the external consumer choice factors which in combination with psychological factors have an impact on consumer decision process. This process leads to the existence of purchase decision. Further, there exists cognitive and emotional view of consumer decision making most relevant to explain the buying decision of LED. Out of affective and cognitive for the purchase of LED, the cognitive factor is prevalent.
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