4 Types of Consumer Buying Behavior (Assael)

Rating

4 Types of Consumer Buying Behavior (Assael)

Marketers need to be aware that consumer decision making varies with the buying behavior of the consumer. Henry Assael distinguished four types based on:

• DEGREE OF BUYER INVOLVEMENT (high/low)
  Consumers are highly involved when the product is expensive, bought infrequently, risky and highly self-expressive.
• DEGREE OF DIFFERENCES AMONG BRANDS (few/significant)
  Consumers may perceive significant differences between brands or just few.

Based on these 2 variables, Assael's four types of consumer buying behavior are:

• COMPLEX BUYING BEHAVIOR
  Consumers go through complex buying behavior when they are highly involved in a purchase and aware of significant differences among brands.
  Example: This applies to high-involvement products such as a laptop computer. Buyers may not know what attributes to consider in these products, so they do research. This buyer will pass through a learning process characterized by first developing beliefs about the product, then attitudes, and then making a thoughtful purchase choice.
  Marketing strategy: Knowing this, marketers can help educate buyers about product, attributes, differentiate and describe the brand's features, and motivate store personnel and others to influence the final brand choice.
  
• DISSONANCE-REDUCING BUYING BEHAVIOR:
  In some cases the consumer is highly involved in a purchase, but sees little difference between the brands.
  Example: This applies to high-involvement products such as carpeting. Carpeting is expensive and self-expressive, yet the buyer may consider most brands in a given price range to be the same. After buying, the consumer might experience dissonance after noticing certain disquieting features or hearing favourable things about other brands.
  Marketing strategy: Marketers should supply beliefs and evaluations that help consumers feel good about their brand choices.
  In this case, the buyer will shop around to learn what is, available but will buy fairly quickly because brand differences are not pronounced. The buyer may respond primarily to a good price or to purchase convenience.
• HABITUAL BUYING BEHAVIOR:
  Many products are bought under conditions of low consumer involvement and the absence of significant brand differences.
  Example: This applies to low-involvement products such as detergent or salt. Consumers keep buying the same brand out of habit, not due to strong brand loyalty because they are passive recipients of information conveyed by advertising.
  Marketing strategy: Ad repetition creates brand familiarity rather than brand conviction. Marketers of such products can use price and sales promotions to entice new customers to try their products. The ad should stress only a few key points. Visual symbols and images are important because they can easily be remembered and associated with the brand. Marketers can try to convert the low-involvement product into one of higher involvement.
• VARIETY-SEEKING BUYING BEHAVIOR:
  Certain buying situations are characterized by low consumer involvement but significant brand differences. Here consumers are known to do a lot of switching between brands.
  Example: This applies to low-involvement products such as potato chips. In this category, consumers switch brands often because they want more variety.
  Marketing strategy: The marketing strategy is different for the market leader and the minor brands in this product category. The market leader will try to encourage habitual buying behavior by dominating shop shelf spaces, keeping shelves stocked, and running frequent reminder ads. Challenger firms will encourage variety seeking by offering lower prices, coupons, free samples, and ads that offer reasons for trying something new.
  

Note that Asmael's framework is aimed at customer buying behavior in B2C environments. In B2B, buyers are better educated professionals and the products being bought are often more complex and more expensive.
Sources:
Henry Assael (1987), "Consumer Behavior and Marketing Action", Kent Publishing.
Philip Kotler, (2002). "Marketing Management Millenium Edition", Tenth Edition, 2002, pp. 96-97

		Comments by date▼ Comments by rating Rating
		2 Molokanova Professor, Ukraine
	Marketers Need to be Aware of Consumer Purchasing Behavior Traditional marketing reacts poorly to significant changes in technologies that literally permeate the entire business process. Marketers are poorly exploiting new opportunities related to the information potential of the Internet and computer technology. Today, technology offers marketers new opportunities to create new values ​​in the business. The one-way communication that marketers typically use with their customers should be replaced by two-way communication in order to influence their purchasing behavior in the future.

		1 Pierre AKMEL Strategy Consultant, France
	4 Types of Consumer Buying Behavior (Assael) Where do we place the outright refusal to purchase, that is to say that the consumer has come to the conclusion that making a purchase is to temporarily do without his power of personal control in the face of the stimulus intended to act on his behaviour. Is it the first type (complex buying behavior) or the second just below (dissonance-reducing buying behavior)?

		1 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	No Willingness / Refusal to Buy Behavior @Pierre AKMEL: Thanks for this excellent question that is so practical, but quickly overlooked. I think an outright refusal to purchase by the "buyer" is not buying behavior. So perhaps it does not belong in any of the 4 categories of Assael. Or we might say there is NO buying involvement and NO perceived (relevant) differences between brands at all. We are looking here at why people do buy, not why they don't buy.

		0 Mrs.Sayran Ghafuri,Kittani Coach, Iraq
	No Willingness / Refusal to Buy Behavior @Jaap de Jonge: I think that the consumer's refusal to buy can be due to at least two reasons: 1. Doubt and uncertainty about the brand. 2. Bad customer service. Please correct me if I am wrong. <...

		1 Molokanova Professor, Ukraine
	New Methods for Consumer Purchasing Behavior Now more than ever, people need to improve their own lives by immersing themselves in different activities to gain a variety of experiences that stimulate positive emotions, and therefore more and mor...

		0 Mrs.Sayran Ghafuri,Kittani Coach, Iraq
	Reply to 'No Willingness / Refusal to Buy Behavior' (Mrs.Sayran Ghafuri) @Editor: Thank you for correcting my information, I think that I did not focus enough on the subject, especially because I do not understand English directly, but rely on Google translation, with my a...