Consumer Behavior in Marketing. Patterns, Types & Segmentation

Consumer behavior explores how individuals and groups make decisions to purchase, use, and dispose of goods and services. This field examines the motivations, influences, and processes that guide consumer choices, providing essential insights for businesses.

Understanding, analyzing, and keeping track of consumer behavior is critical for businesses. Here’s what you should consider. Keep on reading the article to find out what to consider in analyzing consumer behaviors.

Think about the many (buying) decisions you make every day; how much thought are you really giving to them?

Your decisions, be they on autopilot, or not, are what keep marketers up at night.

Like it or not, boosting revenue can only happen once you decode the process behind customers’ decisions.

And that’s what we’ll discuss today: how to understand and influence consumers’ behavior.

What Is Consumer Behavior, Anyway?

Consumer behavior observes how people choose, use, and discard products and services, encompassing their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions.

Understanding consumer behavior is key for businesses trying to orchestrate impactful marketing tactics that shape consumer decision-making pathways.

By gaining insights into the factors that influence consumer choices, such as personal preferences, social influences, cultural norms, and economic factors, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to effectively target and engage their audience.

Consumer behavior incorporates ideas from several sciences including psychology, biology, chemistry, and economics. It draws on psychological principles to understand how individual motivations, perceptions, and attitudes shape consumer decisions. Biological factors, such as physiological needs and sensory experiences, also play a role in influencing consumption behavior. Economic theories help explain how consumers allocate their limited resources among competing wants and needs, guiding businesses in pricing strategies and product positioning.

In essence, consumer buying behavior serves as a crucial foundation for businesses seeking to navigate the complexities of the market and connect with their customers on a deeper level. Understanding what drives consumer decisions empowers businesses to anticipate trends, adapt to changing preferences, and stay ahead in today’s competitive marketplace.

Why Is Consumer Behavior Important?

Think of it this way: if you can’t identify the catalysts for buying decisions, how are you expected to spark a desire for your products in customers’ minds?

Understanding consumer buying behavior is crucial for businesses striving to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace:

• Insight into Customer Needs: Consumer behavior analysis provides valuable insights into the needs, desires, and preferences of your target audience. Understanding how consumers choose products reveals gaps in your product suite or irrelevant offerings, while also highlighting the most wanted products in your catalog.
• Effective Marketing Strategies: Knowing how consumers make purchasing decisions allows businesses to develop more effective marketing strategies. By aligning your messaging, branding, and promotions with consumer preferences, you can increase the likelihood of capturing their attention and driving conversions.
• Product Development and Innovation: Consumer behavior research helps identify gaps in the market and areas for product improvement. By listening to consumer feedback and observing their behavior, businesses can innovate and develop products that resonate with their target audience, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Understanding consumption behavior gives businesses a competitive edge. By staying ahead of consumer trends and preferences, you can anticipate market shifts, outmaneuver competitors, and position your brand as a leader in your industry.
• Customer Engagement and Retention: By understanding consumer behavior, businesses can create personalized experiences that engage and retain customers. By building relationships based on trust and understanding, businesses can foster long-term loyalty and advocacy.

As you can see, the task of understanding consumer behavior is a high-stakes one.

This is why your consumer behavior analysis shouldn’t end until you’ve identified:

• Consumer sentiments and preferences toward different options, including brands and products.
• The factors that influence consumers’ choices among various options.
• Consumer behaviors during the research and shopping phases.
• The influence of consumers’ surroundings, including peers, family, and media, on their decisions.

Types of Consumer Behavior

Even if many of the buying decisions are random and spontaneous, researchers managed to identify four main types of consumer behaviors. Let’s see how they differ from one another.

Complex Purchasing Behavior

This type of behavior occurs when consumers are buying expensive, rarely-purchased items.

In this case, people are deeply involved in the purchase process, conducting extensive research before making a significant investment.

Think about purchasing a house or a car; these are consumer behavior examples of complex buying behavior.

Dissonance-Reducing Purchasing Behavior

Dissonance is defined as a lack of harmony. In the shopping process, this behavior is visible when consumers struggle to differentiate between brands.

There’s no favorite brand and none of the options is particularly attractive, so ‘dissonance’ appears as consumers fear they will regret their decision.

For instance, when buying a lawnmower, you may select one based on price and convenience. However, you’ll still seek reassurance about your choice afterward.

Habitual Purchasing Behavior

As opposed to the first two behaviors, this one appears when consumers mindlessly buy something, with little to no involvement in the product or brand category.

To illustrate, let’s think of grocery shopping: you visit the store and buy your preferred type of bread.

You demonstrate zero brand loyalty, as you go for your preferred taste, no matter the logo on the label.

Variety-Seeking Behavior

Finally, we have this scenario, where consumers purchase a different product not because they were dissatisfied with the previous one, but because they seek variety.

For example, think of people who order protein or other supplements. It’s not that they’re not satisfied with the product in itself; they just got bored of the same taste and looked for some chocolaty feelings in their protein shakes.

It’s important you understand all these types of behaviors and determine which type of customers your brand attracts.

• Are you bringing in people who seek variety in their lives, and they’re just trying out your products?
• People who mindlessly buy your products while waiting for the bus to show up?
• Or people who conducted extensive research, and decided you’re the best possible option for them?

Understanding this nuance will give you a better idea about how to segment different customer types.

How to Tailor Marketing Messages for Each Behavior Type

We recognized the distinct characteristics of each behavior type, and now it’s time to explore strategies for customizing marketing messages for each consumption behavior type. By implementing these tailored approaches, you can effectively engage with consumers, meet their needs and preferences, and drive meaningful interactions that lead to increased sales and brand loyalty:

Tailoring for Complex Purchasing Behavior

• Provide Detailed Information: Offer comprehensive product descriptions, specifications, and comparison charts to assist consumers in their research process.
• Highlight Value Proposition: Emphasize the unique features, benefits, and value proposition of your product or service to justify the higher investment.
• Utilize Testimonials and Reviews: Showcase positive testimonials, reviews, and case studies from satisfied customers to build trust and credibility.
• Offer Personalized Assistance: Provide personalized assistance and expert guidance to address any concerns or questions consumers may have during the decision-making process.

Tailoring for Dissonance-Reducing Purchasing Behavior

• Build Trust and Reassurance: Use persuasive messaging, social proof, and testimonials to demonstrate the superiority of your brand and alleviate consumers’ concerns.
• Provide Satisfaction Guarantees: Offer satisfaction guarantees, free trials, or generous return policies to reduce the perceived risk associated with the purchase.
• Focus on Quality and Reliability: Highlight the quality, reliability, and satisfaction guaranteed by your brand to reassure consumers about their decisions.
• Address Pain Points: Identify common pain points or objections consumers may have and address them directly in your marketing messages to alleviate doubts.

Tailoring for Habitual Purchasing Behavior

• Maintain Brand Visibility: Ensure consistent branding, packaging, and messaging to reinforce brand recognition and stay top-of-mind for consumers.
• Leverage Loyalty Programs: Implement loyalty programs, discounts, and incentives to encourage repeat purchases and reinforce brand loyalty.
• Create Memorable Experiences: Craft memorable brand experiences through engaging content, storytelling, and interactive campaigns to foster emotional connections with consumers.
• Stay Relevant and Topical: Keep your brand relevant and topical by staying updated on industry trends, consumer preferences, and market dynamics to remain appealing to habitual buyers.

Tailoring for Variety-Seeking Behavior

• Offer Diverse Product Range: Provide a diverse range of products, flavors, or options to cater to consumers’ changing preferences and desire for novelty.
• Create Excitement with Limited-Time Offers: Use limited-time offers, seasonal promotions, and new product launches to create excitement and anticipation around your brand.
• Highlight Unique Features: Showcase the unique features, benefits, and experiences offered by each product to entice consumers to explore new options.
• Encourage Exploration and Discovery: Facilitate exploration and discovery by organizing products into categories, providing recommendations, and offering personalized suggestions based on past behavior.

What Influences Consumer Behavior?

Consumer buying behavior is influenced by various factors and you won’t be able to influence all of them.

However, if you’re at the very least aware of the most notable behavior influencers, you can still adapt and pivot to old your strategies over consumers’ day-to-day reality.

Here are some of the most common factors affecting consumer behavior:

Marketing Campaigns

The most obvious, and the most in control factor lies in your marketing efforts.

When executed effectively and consistently, with compelling messaging, marketing tactics can prompt consumers to switch brands and even opt for higher-priced alternatives.

For example, campaigns generated through Facebook can serve as reminders for regularly purchased products or services, like insurance.

Economic Conditions

Moving on to uncontrollable situations, economic climates, particularly regarding big-ticket items such as houses or cars, will significantly shape consumer behavior.

Evidently, positive economic conditions tend to strengthen consumer confidence and their willingness to make purchases, regardless of financial commitments.

Personal Preferences

Personal factors like preferences, priorities, morals, and values play a substantial role in shaping consumer behavior, particularly in industries such as fashion or food.

While advertisements can influence behavior to some extent, consumers’ choices are primarily guided by their personal preferences.

For example, climate change activists are unlikely to start consuming fast-fashion products, just as vegans aren’t going to buy your medium-rare stake, regardless of advertising efforts.

Group Influence

Peer pressure is a significant driver of consumer behavior. The opinions and actions of family members, classmates, neighbors, and acquaintances can exert considerable influence on our decisions.

Social psychology also comes into play, affecting choices like opting for fast food over home-cooked meals, which can be influenced by education levels and social factors.

Purchasing Power

Finally, our financial capacity is a key determinant of our consumer behavior. Unless exceptionally wealthy, budget considerations often precede purchase decisions.

Even if a product is exceptional and the marketing compelling, lacking the financial means to afford it can discourage a purchase.

Segmenting consumers based on their purchasing power helps marketers identify eligible consumers and achieve more favorable outcomes.

Customer Behavior Patterns

Be careful not to confuse buying behavior patterns with buying habits.

Consumer habits develop as inclinations towards actions and become spontaneous over time, while patterns exhibit a predictable mental structure.

Each customer possesses unique buying habits while buying behavior patterns are collective and provide marketers with distinct characterizations.

Customer behavior patterns can be categorized into:

Place of Purchase

Customers often split their purchases among various stores, even if all items are available in one location.

For example, while a hypermarket may offer clothes and shoes, customers may still prefer purchasing those items from specific clothing brands.

Understanding customer behavior regarding place choice will help you identify key store locations.

Items Purchased

Examining a shopping cart reveals valuable consumer insights about purchased items and quantities.

Essential items may be bought in bulk, while luxury items are typically purchased less frequently and in smaller quantities.

The quantity of each item bought is influenced by factors such as perishability, purchasing power, unit of sale, price, and intended consumer base.

Time and Frequency of Purchase

Customers expect service at all hours, especially in the era of e-commerce where shopping is just a few clicks away. Shops must align their services with customer purchase patterns, meeting demands at various times and frequencies. Seasonal variations and regional differences must also be considered.

Method of Purchase

Customers can either make in-store purchases or opt for online orders, paying via credit card or upon delivery.

The method of purchase can influence customer spending, as online shopping may include additional charges like shipping fees.

Consider how much data you’ve already collected about your customers.

As a marketer, yo want to stay on top of pattern analysis, so you can then create strategies to encourage repeat purchases, increased frequency, and higher spending.

How to Study Consumer Behavior?

Studying consumer behavior requires a multifaceted approach that combines various methods and techniques to gain comprehensive insights into the consumer habits, preferences, and
decision-making processes of consumers. Let’s explore some methods:

• Market Research: Conducting thorough market research is essential for understanding consumer behavior. This involves gathering data on demographics, psychographics, purchasing patterns, and preferences through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observational studies. Market research provides valuable insights into consumer needs, motivations, and pain points, helping businesses identify opportunities for product development and marketing strategies.
• Data Analysis: Analyzing data collected from various sources is another crucial aspect of studying consumer behavior. Businesses can leverage data analytics tools and techniques to analyze sales records, website traffic, social media interactions, and customer feedback.
• Customer Segmentation: Segmenting customers based on common characteristics allows businesses to tailor their marketing strategies and messages to specific target audiences.
• Monitoring Consumer Trends: Keeping abreast of consumer trends and industry developments is essential for studying consumer behavior. Businesses can monitor social media trends, industry reports, competitor activities, and emerging technologies to identify opportunities and threats in the market.
• Feedback and Interaction: Actively seeking feedback from customers and engaging with them through various channels allows businesses to gain valuable insights into consumer behavior. Customer interaction also provides opportunities for businesses to gather qualitative insights into consumer preferences and motivations.
• Experimentation and Testing: Experimenting with different marketing strategies and approaches is another effective way to study consumer behavior. A/B testing, focus groups, and pilot programs allow businesses to gather feedback and refine their strategies based on real-world results.

Customer Behavior Segmentation

Segmenting customers and understanding their buying behaviors has always been crucial for businesses. As we defined, customer segmentation is the process of dividing a customer base into groups that share similar characteristics or behaviors. This strategic approach allows businesses to better understand their customers and tailor marketing efforts, products, and services to meet the unique needs and preferences of each segment.

Now, with personalization and customer experience becoming key factors in business success, effective segmentation is more important than ever before. Interestingly, only a third of companies using customer segmentation find it significantly impactful. So you might be an advantage here.

This lack of insights proclaimed by companies highlights the need to find the right segmentation technique that aligns with the unique needs of each business.

Traditionally, marketers have relied on six primary types of behavioral segmentation:

1. Benefits Sought: This type of segmentation delves into understanding what specific benefits or features customers prioritize when making purchasing decisions. For example, when customers buy toothpaste, they may prioritize features like whitening, sensitivity, flavor, or price, shedding light on what motivates their purchases.
2. Occasion or Timing-Based: Segments based on occasions, such as holidays or personal events like birthdays, offer valuable insights into consumer behavior patterns. By understanding the timing of purchases, businesses can anticipate when certain products or services might be in higher demand and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly.
3. Usage Rate: The frequency at which customers interact with a product or service serves as a strong indicator of loyalty, churn, and lifetime value. By segmenting customers based on their usage rate, businesses can identify their most engaged customers and tailor retention strategies to foster continued loyalty.
4. Brand Loyalty Status: Loyal customers, with their higher lifetime value and potential for advocacy, deserve special attention and incentives to nurture their relationship with the brand.
5. User Status: This segmentation method categorizes customers based on their relationship with the brand. Segments may include non-users, prospects, first-time buyers, regular users, and defectors, allowing marketers to adapt strategies accordingly.
6. Customer Journey Stage: Segmenting based on the readiness of buyers enables personalized communication, helping identify obstacles and opportunities for improvement at every stage, including post-purchase behaviors.

In addition to these traditional methods, the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) model provides a behavioral segmentation approach. This model measures the latest purchases, the frequency of purchases, and the total spending of customers.

RFM analysis can be conducted manually or through automated tools such as Omniconvert’s Reveal, enabling eCommerce marketers to customize experiences based on customer insights.

RFM segmentation and analysis can reveal who your most loyal and profitable customers are and also:

• Reveal what brands and products are dragging your business down;
• Build custom recommendations for your customers; 
• Solve certain Customer Experience problems.

Before making decisions based on gut feeling regarding your customers and your audience, observe their behavior, listen to them and build a relationship that will make them stay loyal no matter how aggressive your competitors are.

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Consumer Behavior Case Study From Our Agency

We partnered with AliveCor, a pioneer in FDA-cleared mobile electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) technology, to help them better understand consumer behavior patterns, then use the insights to refine its digital strategy and boost conversion rates.

AliveCor faced a multifaceted challenge: while improving conversion rates was crucial, understanding consumer behavior dynamics emerged as equally important.

When we researched AliveCor’s online ecosystem, blending quantitative UX & UI analysis, with qualitative data derived from surveys, we uncovered some insights regarding consumer behaviour.

Over 40% of website visitors expressed frustration in finding comprehensive information, while 50% relied on physician recommendations when considering AliveCor products.

Furthermore, 26% of engaged visitors left without making a purchase due to insufficient understanding of product functionality.

Insights and Hypotheses

The insights we gathered in the research phase revealed critical consumer behavior trends.

Information gaps and the influence of physician recommendations emerged as key drivers shaping purchase decisions.

Notably, a disconnect between visitor engagement and conversion highlighted the need for clearer product understanding.

Based on these insights, we developed and tested a hypothesis: If we replaced the ‘Our mission’ tab in the navbar with a  ‘How it works’ option, and also created a new page containing the  ‘How it works’ video and other related information, we could increase  the number of clicks on this tab and also the visitors’ engagement and  conversion rates. 

Results:

The experiment confirmed our hypothesis, with significant outcomes:

• Conversion Rate: +21%
• Revenue per Visitor: +5%
• Statistical Relevance: +94%

For more experiments and a more complex experiment showcase, check out the full Case Study here.

Our collaboration highlights the power of consumer behavior insights in driving digital transformation.

With an understanding of consumer preferences and pain points, AliveCor was able to optimize its digital platform to meet user expectations and improve conversion rates.

This case study underscores the importance of consumer-centricity in digital strategy.
If you prioritize consumer behavior insights, you can cultivate meaningful interactions, strengthen brand loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth in eComm & Retail.

And this doesn’t only work in super specific industries, as Retailers worldwide are also confirming how incredible transformative Omniconvert-powered insights can be.

Frequently Asked Questions 

What Is an Example of Consumer Behavior?

Let’s take planning a city break for two as a consumer behavior example.

For someone that just starting dating, it might be extensive decision-making, but for a couple that has spent 5+ years together, it could be limited decision-making.

Another example of consumer behavior can be observed when making a reservation at a restaurant. For a friend’s night out, it requires a limited time investment, while making a reservation for an anniversary or a proposal is a more complex decision making.

What Are the Characteristics of Consumer Behavior?

There are four factors that determine the characteristics of consumer behavior: personal, psychological, social, and cultural.

All factors have a major impact on a consumer’s behavior and the characteristics that define a customer will change as their life changes.

What are the stages of the consumer decision-making process?

The consumer decision-making process typically unfolds in several stages. First, consumers recognize a need or problem they wish to address, which prompts them to begin searching for information to guide their decision-making process. This information search involves gathering details from various sources, including personal experiences, recommendations, and advertising.

Next, consumers evaluate the available options based on criteria such as quality, price, and brand reputation. Once they’ve weighed their options, consumers make a purchase decision. After the purchase, consumers engage in post-purchase evaluation, assessing their satisfaction with the product or service and determining whether it meets their expectations. This evaluation can influence future purchasing behavior and brand loyalty.

How to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts on consumer behavior?

Businesses can utilize surveys and questionnaires to collect feedback from customers regarding their experiences with marketing campaigns, brand perceptions, and purchasing decisions. Secondly, businesses can analyze sales data to track trends, customer acquisition rates, and purchase frequency, providing insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Furthermore, monitoring website traffic, social media engagement metrics, and online reviews can offer valuable insights into consumer responses to marketing efforts. Lastly, conducting market research studies such as focus groups or consumer surveys provides deeper insights into consumer behavior and preferences, allowing businesses to refine their marketing strategies accordingly.