Principles of Marketing, 17/e

5 Consumer Markets and Buyer Behavior

Chapter Preview

You’ve studied how marketers obtain, analyze, and use information to develop customer insights and assess marketing programs. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the most important element of the ­marketplace—customers. The aim of marketing is to engage customers and affect how they think and act. To affect the whats, whens, and hows of buyer behavior, marketers must first understand the whys. In this chapter, we look at final consumer buying influences and processes. In the next chapter, we’ll study the buyer behavior of business customers. You’ll see that understanding buyer behavior is an essential but very difficult task.

To get a better sense of the importance of understanding consumer ...