Buyer Behaviour/Decision Process

You’ll buy nothing unless first your Attention is drawn to it, and unless it then gains your Interest, and unless you then Desire to have it. Only then will you take Action and reach for your credit card.

That’s the basic classical marketing/advertising model of Buyer Behaviour – ‘AIDA’ – attention, interest, desire, action. There are other newer and more complex models around which interpose various other stages but they mainly serve to make people doing a thesis feel clever — we’ve been there so we can say that! So when you are putting your marketing program together remember AIDA. There is no sense in having ads screaming for attention if you can’t capture the interest of your prospects when they come to take a look. And that interest must be strong enough to mature into desire or you’ll get no action.

Easier said than done? Yes, unfortunately, it is.
Models like AIDA of themselves sell nothing for you. Their importance is in giving you a framework for thinking and action. You still have to do the thinking and take the action. A good model helps you cover all your bases.

Implicit in the AIDA model is that the marketer starts the process by grabbing the prospect’s attention. But what about when the need first arises with the consumer and he/she initiates the action. Then the process (for the online buyer) is:

* Problem recognition………………………….. I need something
* Information search……………………………. Let’s surf!
* Evaluation of alternatives………………….. Which deal best suits me?
* Decision and action………………………….. I’ll take this one!

What’s the biggest new element that has been introduced in this sequence? Alternatives! Competition! There’s a lot of it about and it provides the reason why it is incumbent on the marketer to know his customers better than his competitors do, understand their needs better, understand their behaviour better, imbue the product with a better mix of physical and psychological values at a price high enough to suggest quality but low enough to suggest value. Remember that generally people do not want cheap because cheap is synonymous with low quality – what they usually want is value i.e. the price is very attractive considering what you get!