Understanding How Marketing Influences Consumer Behavior

January 17, 2024

Introduction

Are you aware of how marketing influences consumer behavior? Businesses must understand a consumer’s needs at the most specific level and cater their marketing campaigns to those needs. Understanding the connection between marketing and consumer behavior can help your business experience sales growth and become a brand that customers trust.

What influences consumer behavior? What strategies can you use to influence consumer behavior? And how can you make the most of your marketing strategy? At Bear North Digital, we’re here to explain.

In this guide, we’ll explain the ins and outs of different consumer buying behaviors and ways that you can target your marketing strategy to satisfy customers. Learn from the experts at Bear North Digital, a leading Shopify marketing agency, and discover how you can enhance your business.

What Is Consumer Behavior?

When companies focus on consumer buying behavior, they take a closer look at the psychological and personality factors of each consumer who buys their products. This study involves the thought process that consumers go through when deciding whether to buy or ditch a certain product.

Consumer behavior encompasses a variety of thought patterns and characteristics, all of which play a role in motivating someone to buy something from a brand. Understanding the wants and needs of customers, as well as their motivations, helps companies create cohesive advertising campaigns that drive sales.

What Influences Consumer Behavior?

Before we dive into how marketing influences consumer behavior, let’s examine the main factors that impact a person’s buying decision. All of the following traits and characteristics play a key role in motivating a consumer and influencing their wants and needs. Discover the prominence of each one and why you need to consider them in your marketing strategy.

Culture

What social groups does a consumer fit into? How does their presence in these groups impact their buying decisions? You need to ask these questions when creating a marketing campaign focused on consumer behaviors.

A person’s cultural identity includes their ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, and more.

Personal Characteristics

Say you’re a car dealer that sells primarily trucks and SUVs. You might build a marketing plan around consumers with an occupation or lifestyle that matches these products. For example, someone who loves to venture into the wilderness and go off-roading will be more apt to explore rugged pickup trucks rather than a small sedan.

Social Factors

Our family and friends are part of our everyday lives and have an impact on the products we buy. Using the previous example of a car dealer business, you might find consumers want to explore a certain car brand because their family members drive the same car and rave about it. The people we interact with on any social level can end up swaying our buying decisions.

This is especially prevalent in the age of social media when certain products go viral. Internet data reveals that nearly five billion people around the globe use some form of social media. The enormous influence of social media directly affects consumers and serves as a modern marketing must-have for businesses.

Psychology

What are your inherent beliefs about pickup trucks vs. sedans? Are you willing to learn more about a certain car brand despite never driving one of its models before? These questions focus on the psychological influence that comes into play regarding consumer behavior.

If you want to know how marketing influences consumer behavior, it often involves targeting psychological factors like:

Our attitudes and beliefs
Our perception of brands or products
Our motivation

The Decision-Making Process When Buying a Product or Service

Most people spend time researching a product or brand before pulling the trigger and buying something. They want to ensure that the product is a worthwhile investment that can meet their needs and perform better than a competing brand. Consumers come to this decision in a thorough process consisting of the following steps:

Recognizing the problem
Searching for solutions
Evaluating the alternatives
Making a final purchase decision
Evaluating your post-purchase decision

What does this process look like in real life? Let’s say you’re in the market for a computer. Your current system lags when you are gaming, and it doesn’t have adequate storage space.

You know that the problem surrounds computer performance and storage, so you start looking for products that meet your needs. Your research includes looking at various brands to see how each one stacks up, and then eventually, you decide to buy a computer. Once you start using your new computer, you’ll take note of how well it works and if it meets your expectations.

Brands earn loyal customers when they report satisfaction after purchasing a product or service.

The Connection Between Marketing and Consumer Behavior

Companies must understand how marketing influences consumer behavior and use it to their advantage. Successful brands use their advertisements and marketing campaigns to tap into a customer’s psychological viewpoints. Once they craft messages that appeal to the customer’s ethos, they’ll have an easier time getting that consumer to buy their product or service.

Below are some of the ways that marketing directly impacts consumer behavior and helps businesses grow their sales.

Brand Recall

The most effective marketing campaigns stick with people regardless of whether they’re part of your brand’s target audience. If you make a memorable impression, people are more likely to shop with your brand when they’re in need of your goods or services. Use the main components that influence consumer behavior (culture, social status, personal characteristics, and psychology) when catering to your audience.

Tapping into someone’s beliefs, lifestyle, social class, and more helps your message stick with them. Brand recall is crucial when you’re in need of a service and aren’t sure where to start. Having someone remember your messaging makes them more likely to research your company.

Emotional Response

When you think about how marketing influences consumer behavior, drumming up an emotional response from your audience is key. You need to focus on your audience’s social surroundings, plus their beliefs and motivations, to elicit their emotions. If you’re able to reach a customer’s emotions in your marketing campaign, your message could sway their decision to buy something from you.

Let’s use the topic of product sustainability as an example. Social trends impact someone’s own beliefs and attitudes toward using products that are eco-friendly and sustainable. If you center your marketing around this, you’ll strike an emotional chord with your audience and lead them to think favorably about your brand.

Brand Loyalty

What makes someone stay loyal to a brand? Overall, they usually report satisfaction with the product or service due to several factors, including:

Product performance or results
Fair pricing
Company attentiveness to a problem
And more

Highlighting these topics within your marketing messages draws interest in your brand. If someone buys your product and it satisfies them, they may become a repeat customer loyal to your brand.

Marketing Strategies That Impact Modern Consumer Behavior

Customer behavior trends are always evolving. Remember that you must adapt your own marketing campaign to fit the wants and needs of your audience. Today’s business landscape has a few essential components that consumers want from brands.

Incorporate these issues into your marketing strategy, and you’ll leave a lasting impression on your audience, which could end up growing your sales.

Be Transparent

If you understand how marketing influences consumer behavior, then you must also understand the thoughts and attitudes of your audience. Many consumers today believe in supporting businesses with ethical practices and products. Be transparent with your messaging to build trust and loyalty with your customers.

Go Digital

In today’s digital world, people can access any product at their fingertips. You want your brand to stand out, but for good reasons. Customers want to know that your products are available online so they have easy access if they need to buy one.

Operate a user-friendly e-commerce site and use digital marketing tools, like social media marketing, to draw consumers to your site.

Maintain Communication

You can’t assume that every customer has the same communication preferences. Some learn about brand deals and discounts through email marketing, while others never check their inbox. Some might choose to follow your brand’s activity on social media, while another section of your audience isn’t on any social platforms.

Have plenty of variety in your communication, and use consumer behavior analyses to determine which methods are becoming most popular.

Promise Security

Consumers are happy to stay loyal to one brand, but they want to ensure that the brand doesn’t use their personal information in any capacity. Modern buyers crave anonymity since security breaches and the use of private data are huge concerns. Make it clear to your audience that your business will never ask for personal information apart from finalizing the transaction.

Customers will have peace of mind that their identity remains safe whether they decide to buy your products or not.

Think Green

In an earlier example, we mentioned product sustainability as a way to strike an emotional response from consumers who share the same belief. This issue is increasingly prevalent for consumers, and advertisers need to recognize the impact of the trend. If you can make your eco-friendly products and operations a selling point, you can successfully sway customers.

The Bottom Line

Knowing how marketing influences consumer behavior comes down to a core understanding of a person’s lifestyle and personality, culture, social status, and psychology. Advertisers can yield sales when they create messaging that plays into their audience’s behaviors and needs. If a person is happy with their purchased product or service, they are likely to be a repeat customer for the brand.

The marketing landscape keeps evolving, and companies need to adapt their messaging as consumer behavior trends change. Focusing on important topics like customer security, brand sustainability, and more appeals to modern consumers and makes them more likely to trust your brand.

Get Expert Marketing Solutions From Bear North Digital

It’s incredibly important to understand how consumer behavior intersects with marketing if you want to create an effective business st

The advertising professionals at Bear North Digital understand better than anyone else how marketing influences consumer behavior. We help businesses drive sales by using tools like dynamic remarketing and knowledge of consumer trends. If you’re ready to boost your business performance, our team is ready to help.