1.8 Summary

In Topic 1, we covered five major learning objectives to pave the pathway for the rest of our consumer behavior textbook. We can now recognize how consumer behavior integrates into all aspects of our marketing strategy and affects every product stage from selection to disposal. In order for our marketing strategies to be successful, we need to treat and target our consumers as individuals with their own thought processes and expectations. When customers realize that we recognize their needs and preferences, they will be more likely to receive our marketing campaigns and become return customers, which results in increased profits or donations for our organizations.

We also observed that in addition to behavioral differences between individual consumers, there is a distinction between individual and organizational consumer behavior. These distinctions lead to very different tactics in advertising topics. Where we may create a LinkedIn ad that uses industry-specific terminology and focuses on large-scale solutions to target organizational consumers, that type of campaign would not be successful with our individual consumers. Individual consumers are primarily looking for short-term purchases for personal use and would respond better to accessible language in advertising copy.

Targeting both consumer types in advertising has been a consumer behavior experiment for the past hundred years. In this topic, we discovered that businesses began hiring psychologists to conduct marketing research as early as the 1920s. For the next forty years, businesses used both persuasion and education in their marketing strategies to try to generate sales. In the 1960s, the United States government began to hold businesses accountable in their advertising with the Consumer Bill of Rights. This was the start of consumers empowered in both choice and information access.

While we focused on for-profit organizations in the first part of Topic 1, we also touched on the nonprofit realm of marketing with the four nonprofit consumer types: clients and beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, and political and organizational entities. Each of these consumers have their own motivations and desires to interact with, benefit from, or donate to the nonprofit. While there are multiple consumer types in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, all consumers are inclined to respond to emerging consumer behavioral trends. Therefore, it is crucial for us to learn to identify which trends to capitalize on in our campaigns. We can follow current consumer behavioral thought leaders and companies to improve our ability to use and identify trends. Our resulting skillsets can then be reflected in the T-shaped marketer graph as our continuous growth plan.