A consumer-oriented approach is crucial to company survival in today’s competitive environment. With family spending power at a standstill and an increasingly fragmented market (with a variety of products and services, ways to purchase, sales channels, and means of communication, etc.), businesses need to understand the consumer experience and align their marketing strategies accordingly. Virtual shopping and enhanced reality are just two phenomena that make up the intricate mosaic in which the consumer moves today; he is more informed, analytical, experimental and, above all, emotional in his purchasing.
With the goal of helping managers to understand how emotional and non-conscious processes influence consumer behavior and to build successful marketing strategies, we wrote the book Understanding Consumer Behavior and Consumption Experience.
From the consumer’s initial perception to his behavior in the online market, the purchasing experience, the relationship with products and brands, ethnic identity and cross-cultural variations, and consumer happiness and well-being, the book offers a practical guide for decision making, based on the most relevant findings of contemporary academic research.
Understanding consumer emotions
The foreword by Dr. María de Lourdes Dieck Assad, Dean of EGADE Business School, states that in the age of virtual shopping and enhanced reality, consumer satisfaction continues to be driven by factors such as “trust, emotions, psychodynamics, and self-reference criteria that are often complex and characterized by high volatility.”
This is why, even if businesses accept the significant role that positive and negative emotions have on consumer decisions, a better understanding of the complexity of these emotions is required to design a marketing strategy that gets the desired response from consumers and increases satisfaction and loyalty. We delve into the different aspects of consumer behavior that affect emotions, such as persuasion, word-of-mouth, the non-conscious, well-being and happiness, vulnerability, multiculturalism, social networking sites, etc.
Business leaders meticulously analyze these factors to develop reactive marketing strategy and gain tactical advantage. In hard-hitting economic times, many businesses adopt a customer-centric approach to retain existing customers rather than investing in acquiring new ones, for example, by offering more value-for-money strategies. In this case, we emphasize the experience of multinationals in emerging countries, focused on cost-innovation capabilities and mass-market prices.
For consumer-oriented strategies to be successful, we recommend companies to empower consumers, educate them about the attributes of the competition to enable the right decision making, offer an integrated experience on buying and consumption, and definitely improve their ability to purchase intelligently.
We suggest an in-depth analysis on consumer behavior and consumption experiences. The eleven chapters in this book are a pivotal reference source for business managers and marketing executives, as well as for scholars and graduate students interested in the relationship between consumer cultures and businesses.
