Personal Factors
A buyer's decisions also are affected by personal characteristics like the buyer's age and life- cycle stage, economic situation, occupation, lifestyle, and self-concept and personality.
I. Age and Life-Cycle Stage
People alter the services and goods they buy over their lifetimes. Tastes in clothes, food, furniture, and recreation are frequently age related. Buying is also shaped by stage of the family life cycle-the stages by which families might pass like they mature over time. Marketers frequently define their target markets in terms of life-cycle stage and develop suitable products and marketing plans for each stage. The traditional family life-cycle stages include young singles and married couples along children.
II. Occupation
A person's occupation influence the goods and services bought. Blue-collar workers tend to buy more rough work clothes, while white-collar workers purchase more business suits. Marketers try to recognize the occupational groups that contain an above-average interest in their services and products. A company may even specialize in making products required by a given occupational group. Therefore, computer software companies will design different type of products for, accountants, brand managers, lawyers, engineers and doctors.
III. Economic Situation
A person's economic situation will influence product choice. Marketers of income-sensitive goods observe trends in personal income, interest rates, and savings. If economic indicators point to a recession, marketers may take steps to reposition, redesign and reprise their products closely.
IV. Lifestyle
People coming from the similar subculture, social class, and occupation can have quite different lifestyles. Life style is a person's style of living as expressed in his or her psychographics. It involves measuring consumers' main AIO dimensions-activities (hobbies work, sports, social events, shopping), interests (fashion, food, family, recreation), and opinions (regarding themselves, social issues, products, business). Lifestyle captures something more than person's personality or social class. It profiles a person's entire pattern of acting and interacting in world.
Various research firms have developed lifestyle categorization. It divides consumers into eight groups depend on two major dimensions: resources and self-orientation. Self-orientation groups include principle-oriented consumers who buy depend on their views of the world; status-oriented buyers who depend their purchases on opinions and actions of others; and action-oriented buyers who are driven by their desire for activity, variety, and risk taking. Consumers within each orientation are further categorization into those with abundant resources and those along minimal resources, based on whether they have low or high levels of, education, income, self-confidence, energy, health and other factors. Consumers with either very low or very high levels of resources are categorization without regard to their self-orientations (strugglers, actualizes). Actualizes are people with so much resources that they may indulge in any or all self-orientations. On the contrary, strugglers are people with too little resources to be included in any of consumer orientation.
V. Personality and Self-Concept
Each person's distinct personality affected his or her buying behaviour. Personality refers to the exclusive psychological characteristics that lead to fairly consistent and enduring responses to one's own environment. Personality is typically described in terms of traits such like, dominance, self-confidence, autonomy, sociability, defensiveness, adaptability, and aggressiveness. Personality may be useful in analyzing the consumer behaviour for sure brand or product choices. For instance, coffee marketers have exposed that heavy coffee drinkers tend to be great on sociability. Therefore, to attract customers, Starbucks and other coffeehouses make environments in which people may relax and socialize over a cup of steaming coffee.
Various marketers use a concept linked to personality-a person's self-concept (also called self-image). Basic self-concept premise is that the people's possessions contribute to and reflect their identities; that are, "we are what we have." therefore, to understand consumer behaviour, the marketer have to first understand the relationship between consumer self-concept and possessions. For instance, the founder and main executive of Barnes & Noble, the nation's leading bookseller, notice that people purchase books to support their self-images.