Question

What is subculture? Describe at least two subcultures to which you belong and identify any reference groups that might influence your consumption behavior?

What is the significance of complex consumer buying behavior and the level of consumer involvement to marketers?

How is the need recognition triggered in the buyer decision making process? Provide examples of the two different types of triggers

Answer 1

1.Subculture can be defined as group of people within a culture having their unique cultural behaviour that separates it from their parent culture. Subculture can be in terms of nationality or linguistic form, or religion and so on.

Taking the case of India:

India a nation with various cultures from northern India to southern India.

• (Religion as subculture)Here people are from various religion from Hindu, Muslims, Buddhist, Parsi , Christian to Sikh. All religions have different belief related to God and moral values. Consumer buying pattern also differs in all the cases, for example some community prefer dark color while other prefer light color. Some religion prefer only vegetarian food while other eat non-veg.
• (Language as subculture)Here, in India people speak Hindi, Odia, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil,Marathi and many. Linguistic groups also have their own unique food choice/ dressing style. For example Southern India ( like Tamils) prefer tangy food. However northern India(like Delhi-hindi as language) prefer spicy food. In this way their likes and dislikes can be differentiated.

Being from Northern part of India, food preference is spicy. We wear dress as per occassions, for example during festive season ,ethnic dresses are high on demand because everyone celebrates festivals as per their culture.

2. Complex buying behaviour:

It is of utmost importance to understand the consumer behaviour as this will help to identify how to market products and boost sales. Complex consumer behaviour research will help to know how to deal with different consumer pattern, who should be the focus and how to influence that group. Understanding the consumer involvement will help to identify ways to influence the group as a whole. For example if a community is understood to be highly sensetive to price, then low price will be the prime concern to influence that group.

3.Need recognition: The need recognition is basically said to be triggered by two ways-

(a) internal way- internal way of need recognition is triggered because of the persons own lifestyle and own choices. Example- own perception like not spending more for daily use item, the persions needand wants, the persons hunger and thirst for something they desire, their rational behaviour as a consumer.

(b) external way- under this, a person gets influenced or start demanding when he/she gets influenced by something from environment but which is not an actual need . Suppose, a person meets his friend and likes his shoe, though the person has enough shoe but still the person goes to buy the same shoe his friend has wore. This is because he got influenced by the environment. Such can also be triggered by Advertisements, peer pressure etc.