A company can even specialize in making products needed by a given occupational group.
Economic Situation - a person’s economic situation will greatly affect product choice. Marketers of income-sensitive goods closely watch trends in personal income, savings, and interest rates. If economic indicators point to a recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition, and reprice their products.
Life Style - people coming from the same subculture, social class, and even occupation may have quite different life styles. Life style is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interests, and opinions. Life style captures something more than the person’s social class or personality. The life-style concept, when used carefully, can help the marketer gain an understanding of changing consumer values and how they affect buying behavior.
Personality and Self-Concept - each person’s distinct personality will influence his or her buying behavior. Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and lasting responses to one’s own environment. Many marketers use a concept related to personality-a person’s self-concept. Psychological Factors:
A person’s buying choices are also influenced by four major psychological factors - motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes. Motivation - a person has many needs at any given time. Some needs are biological, arising from states of tension such as hunger, thirst, or discomfort. Other needs are psychological, arising from the need for recognition, esteem, or belonging. Most of these needs will not be strong enough to motivate the person to act at a given point in time. A need becomes a motive when it aroused to a sufficient lever of intensity. A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction. Motivation researchers collect in-depth information from small samples of consumers to uncover the deeper motives for their product choices.
Perception - a motivated person is ready to act. How the person acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. Two people with the same motivation and in the same situation may act quite differently because they perceive the situation differently. Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world. People can form different perceptions of the same stimulus because of three perceptual processes: selective exposure, selective distortion, and selective retention. Learning - when people act, they learn.