Week 3

Chapter 6

Week 3 consisted of looking into Chapter 6 and also working more on our Smart Projects. Chapter 6 was concentrated on consumer behavior and how the consumers make different decisions and what affects them.

When it comes to Decision Making many customers go through a process to be able to determine if they should buy the product or not. There are 5 steps in the process:


Need Recognition

• Need recognition is basically just evaluating the product to see whether it is a want or need. Determining this can help the consumer to decide if they should buy the product or not.

Information Search

• The information search is anyway of finding information about the product. It can be through an internal search, where a consumer just remembers information, or an external search, where they find information from an outside source. These help to make a well informed decision of whether to buy or not

Evaluation of Alternatives

• After doing research the consumer will most likely try and find alternatives to the product. If there are alternatives that are more preferable to them they may take their money elsewhere.

Purchase

• The purchase can be one of three kinds; planned, partially planned, or unplanned. Planned is when the consumer has gone through all the other steps of the decision making process and know specifically what they want to get. Partially planned refers to knowing a general sense of what you are going to buy, and unplanned is going in completely blind and impulsively buing something.

Postpurchase Behavior

• After purchase there is a certain expectation that the product must uphold. Consumers are expecting the product to be as they thought and work properly. If not they may return it and set out for another product.

Aside from the Decision Making Process, there is also a number of different influential factors that play a role in how a consumer will buy products. Some of them include:

Consumer involvement is a large factor. If the consumer is more involved in the purchase then they may be more or less likely to buy something. If they are more interested in the product they may be more involved.

Social Influences such as family, opinion leaders, and reference groups will sway peoples decisions. If a person is unsure of a purchase they are likely to ask the opinion of others. In doing this their buying decision could change significantly. Things like buying clothes will sometimes be a group decision because you need a second opinion to make sure it looks right.

Smart Project
These consumer behaviors can help us to enhance our product more. One specific part is that for our product for forgetting your keys there aren't really any alternatives. There is no other device that really will do the same thing as ours which gives us an advantage.

With our smart project however we do have lots of work. We are still in the designing phase really. We aren't quite sure what our name is, how it will look, exactly all the usages of the device. We have created a problem statement and identified some trends, constraints, and criteria for the product though.

Problem Statement: To design a device that can prevent someone from locking their door unless they have their keys on them.

By identifying all of these it will help to make our process easier so we can go on to advance the product more and figure out exactly how we will make and market it.