Learning describes changes in an individual’s behavior arising from experience. The practical significance of learning theory of marketers is that they can build demand for a product by associating it with strong drives, using motivating cues, and to the same drives as competitors and providing similar cues because buyers are more likely to transfer loyalty to similar brands then to dissimilar ones. Or it may design its brand to appeal to a different set of drives and offer strong cue inducements to switch (discrimination). Beliefs and Attitudes - through acting and learning, people acquire their beliefs and attitudes. These in turn influence their buying behavior. A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something. Marketers are interested in the beliefs that people formulate about specific products and services. If some of the beliefs are wrong and prevent purchase, the marketer will want to launch a campaign to correct them. People have attitudes regarding religion, politics, clothes, music, food, and almost everything else. An attitude describes a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or idea. Attidudes put people into a frame of mind of liking or disliking things, moving toward or away from them.


SUMMARY

Markets must be understood before marketing strategies can be developed. The consumer market buys goods and services for personal consumption. Consumers vary tremendously in age, income, education, tastes and other factors. Marketers must understand how consumers transform marketing and other inputs into buying responses. Consumer behavior is influenced by the buyer’s charakteristics and by the buyer’s decision process. Buyer charakteristics include four major factors: cultural, social, personal, and psychological. A person’s buying behavior is the result of the complex interplay of all these cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors. Many of these factors cannot be controlled by marketers, but they are useful in identifying and understanding the consumers that marketers are trying to influence.

LITERATURE:
Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong - Principles of Marketing.