Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior

Question A

Nexba is a sugarless beverage that targets people looking to lead healthier lifestyles. It therefore uses consumer behavior to target the culture, motivation, and perception of different individuals to contribute to the development of the overall brand image. The product, Nexba, contains a variety of naturally sugar free drinks. The idea is to use the new emergent culture that has led people to living healthier lifestyles, use the motivation and attitude linked to the same, and create perceptions of a product that will make life better for consumers.

Motivation represents an inner drive, an attitude to attain a specific goal. It is an arousal that is objective-directed and goal oriented. In consumer behavior, the result is a desire to consume products and the entre experience. Nexba’s sugarless products are meant to motivate the target markets to change their purchasing behavior towards consumption of sugar free and healthier products. For example, individuals involved in sports are motivated to purchase the products because of the promise of a healthier body. Similarly, motivation can target status and esteem type of needs when the behavior of a consumer is influenced by the status quo and esteem needs.

Perception denotes a process through which people receive, select, and interpret stimuli to create coherent and meaningful interpretation of the world. Perception happens when stimuli come within the range of an individual’s sensory receptor nerves. There can be deliberate or random exposure that calls for immediate and/or long term decision making. Exposure leads to attention, then interpretation, storage of content (memory), and later influences purchase and consumption decisions. Attention is influenced by individual characteristics, stimulus characteristics, and situational characteristics. The promise of a sugarless and healthier beverage creates a perception of a superior product that is better than the market alternatives. The Gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, closure, continuation, constancy, and figure and ground then lead to cognitive and affective interpretation. Attention helps in creating retail strategies for marketers, in brand positioning, media strategizing, advertising, and interpretation of these elements. From a consumer’s perspective, perception helps to shape how a consumer perceives Nexba’s products through its image and how it is presented through marketing efforts.

Nexba also targets the culture of its variant target markets. Culture is defined as a unique pattern of the shared understandings or meanings in a social group. Culture is invented and includes knowledge, myths, customs, symbols, language, rituals, art, beliefs, myths, morals, and the law among other artifacts. Dimensions of culture include the fact that it is comprehensive, acquired, unconscious, adaptive, and creates boundaries for behavior. Cultural values create norms and sanctions. Norms are the ranges of what is considered to be appropriate behavior and sanctions are penalties for the violations of said norms. The end product is the consumption patterns. Cultural values consist of widely held values and belief systems that affirm what should be desirable in an individual. Terminal and instrumental values are important elements in shaping the perception of an individual in life. Terminal values include the primary end-states or goals of an individual (happiness, pleasure, equality, security, or wisdom) while instrumental values are the basic approaches to reaching terminal values (honesty, courage, politeness, and loving), define as the means. These values are used by consumers to create critical product attributes and shape the belief and attitude regarding a brand, leading to brand selection and product class selection. Therefore, culture is very influential in creating a brand image.

Question B

Culture plays a pivotal role in molding individuals to conform to certain societal standards and expectations. It helps in the creation of an environment that includes ways of thinking, methods of interacting with other groups, and shared belief systems. Culture leads to a way of perceiving life that is unique to a certain group of people based on their values and other cultural boundaries. It creates norms and limits people to thinking alongside these norms. For Nexba, a sugar free product, culture would influence how consumers perceive it and the image it creates in an individual’s mind. For example, in the American culture and context, issues relating to diabetes and obesity have led to cultural shifts in the way people perceive sugars. The perception in such cultures now leads people to value health and to create limits and norms that are driving people towards sugar-free products.

In marketing the product, perception has a number of strategy implications. First, the modern consumer makes decisions on the basis of what they perceive as opposed to basing decisions on objective reality. The selection of stimuli from the environment by consumers is based on the interaction of motives and expectations with the said stimuli. Therefore, the communication made by a product through branding and other activities such as advertising resonates differently with different markets, groups of people and individuals, all on the basis of perception. The way a consumer perceives a product, such as the sugar-free Nexba, is likely to influence their intention to buy, loyalty, and word of mouth marketing among other important marketing implications. For example, some consumers are likely to perceive sugar-free products, e.g. Nexba, as containing zero sugars and therefore very safe for consumption. Others are likely to see the marketing as fake, owing to the taste of sugar in the product or other factors influencing their decisions. Overall, the perception created through exposure and interaction with the product is likely to affect consumer behavior.

Motivation is very important for a brand as it helps in creating sustained relations between a product/brand and the consumer. It enables a consumer to decide the brand to buy, given the traits that are desirable and those that they want to embody. Motivation aids consumers in establishing a link to a brand as they can identify with both the product and what it communicates. For example, a consumer who is focused on leading a healthier lifestyle will be attracted to Nexba’s new range of products. Beyond the true value of the product, the consumer creates a liking for the brand, which helps to project his own goals and objectives through the product they consume. The marketing implications of motivation are that they help to match a consumer to the desirable product based on their goals and objectives.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR MKTG3142-11 |

Homework 3 (40 points)

Instructions:

  1. This assignment will contribute up to 20% of your overall grade for homework; answer all the questions as completely and clearly as possible using grammatically correct prose rather than cryptic bullet points.
  2. Do your own work. You are allowed to collaborate with your fellow students in contemplating the answers; however, what you submit must be your own work in your own words. Any assignments with identical wording will receive ZERO as grade.
  3. You MUST reference all the sources you consulted in completing this assignment. This means that you should use in-text referencing in your answers and conclude the assignment with a section entitled “List of sources” in which you use the Harvard style to reference all your sources, including the prescribed textbook.
  4. Use this document to formulate your answers and submit the final version through Blackboard on or before the due date: 30 September 2019 at 11:59pm ET.

The Leaf is a compact, five-door-hatchback, electric car manufactured by Nissan and introduced in Japan and the United States in December 2010, followed by various European countries and Canada in 2011. More than 300,000 Leafs have been sold worldwide through January 2018, making it the world’s all-time best-selling highway-capable electric car. As of December 2017, the United States was the world’s largest market for the Leaf, with almost 114,827 units sold, followed by Japan with 72,500, and Europe with 68,000. As an all-electric car, the Leaf produces no tailpipe pollution or greenhouse-gas emissions when in operation, thereby contributing to reduced dependence on petroleum. Among its many accolades, the Leaf won the 2010 Green Car Vision Award, the 2011 European Car of the Year, the 2011 World Car of the Year, and the 2011–2012 Car of the Year Japan. [Adapted from Wikipedia]

  1. Eight years into the product lifecycle of the Leaf, you are tasked with developing an advertising campaign to remind the target audience of the Leaf’s virtues. Design an advertisement that would achieve this goal based on high cognitive effort. You may use images harvested from the Internet or draw your own, but any copy (text) must be your own words. Also, discuss the specific theoretical concepts and principles you used in compiling your ad. [10]
  • Eight years into the product lifecycle of the Leaf, you have been tasked with developing an advertising campaign to remind the target audience of the Leaf’s virtues. Design an advertisement that would achieve this goal based on high affective effort. You may use images harvested from the Internet or draw your own, but any copy (text) must be your own words. Also, discuss the specific theoretical concepts and principles you used in compiling your ad. [10]

Question 2 [20]

The Old Spice Man Spices Up Brand Marketing

When Isaiah Mustafa appeared in a 2010 Super Bowl commercial

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE]

with a towel wrapped around his waist and a bottle of Old Spice body wash in one hand, he kicked off a long-running viral marketing campaign that has rejuvenated the brand’s sales. Mustafa, a former NFL wide receiver, smiled into the camera and addressed women viewers, saying he was “the man your man could smell like” if they used Old Spice. The combination of his wryly funny lines, winning delivery, and buff physique made the commercial an instant YouTube hit. Suddenly, Old Spice, a pre-World War II brand that zoomed to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, was an overnight social media sensation, with Facebook fans, Twitter comments, and consumer-generated spoof videos stirring up conversation around the world. The Old Spice Man campaign, created by ad agency Wieden & Kennedy for brand owner Procter & Gamble, had successfully added a relevancy and an affective appeal that was attracting and entertaining a younger audience than the brand’s traditional customer base and boosting sales significantly.

As soon as the first Isaiah Mustafa ad went viral, the agency followed up with a second commercial in the same humorous vein, again featuring the bare-chested Old Spice Man. Again, public response was so enthusiastic that the campaign geared up for a new and unprecedented social media blitz. This time, Old Spice invited users of Twitter, Reddit, and Digg – including celebrities and athletes such as Ellen DeGeneres, Demi Moore, and Apolo Ohno – to submit questions for the Old Spice Man to answer. As hundreds of questions poured in, consumers voted for the ones they wanted to see answered. Next, in a marathon three-day studio session, the agency scripted and Mustafa starred in 186 brief YouTube videos responding to individual questioners in typical wry style. When Kevin Rose of Digg.com tweeted that he wasn’t feeling well, the Old Spice Man answered with a “get well” video that Rose immediately mentioned to his more than 1 million Twitter followers.

The concentrated barrage of targeted, personalized tweets and entertaining videos stirred up enormous positive word-of-mouth among consumers. Just as important, Old Spice was the subject of many stories on TV and radio, in the blogosphere, in newspapers and magazines, and seemingly everywhere on the Internet where news commentators posted articles, podcasts, or videos. All the media coverage (for which the brand did not pay) fueled even more consumer interest in Old Spice. Within days of the Old Spice Man’s answer videos appearing online, the brand’s Facebook page collected more than 600,000 “likes” and the online videos were viewed more than 7 million times.

Procter & Gamble supported the social media campaign with discount coupons and other promotional efforts that reinforced brand awareness and offered an incentive to buy and try Old Spice products right away. Old Spice sales quickly skyrocketed, and the brand captured the market-leader position, despite competition from Unilever’s Axe, Beiersdorf’s Nivea, and Henkel’s Right Guard brands.

A year later, Procter & Gamble launched a new chapter in the Old Spice Man story. This time, Fabio – the model and star of many romance novel covers – appeared in online videos challenging Isaiah Mustafa for the title of Old Spice Man. This tongue-in-cheek, “mano-a-mano” competition consisted of 39 back-and-forth videos that drew millions of viewers and tens of thousands of social media comments. Consumers clicked to vote for the Old Spice Man they preferred, and after several days of hectic and humorous exchanges, Mustafa and Fabio appeared in one final video announcing that Mustafa had retained his title. The big winner, of course, was Old Spice, which gained even more brand awareness and enjoyed higher sales. Now Procter & Gamble is taking the Old Spice Man campaign on the road to universities and cities where consumers can try branded products and have their photos taken in poses reminiscent of the original Old Spice Man commercial.

CASE QUESTIONS

  1. How is Old Spice using evaluative conditioning to influence consumers’ affective attitudes? Explain what evaluative conditioning is and then identify the conditioned stimulus (CS), unconditioned stimulus (UCS), unconditioned response (UCR), and conditioned response (CR) in this situation. [10]
  • What role does the dual-mediation hypothesis play in the Old Spice Man’s marketing success? Start your answer by explaining the dual-mediation hypothesis [4]
  • What aspects of the communication source are involved in influencing affective attitudes toward Old Spice? [4]
  • Do you think consumers will maintain a positive attitude toward Old Spice if the Old Spice Man campaign suspends messages for more than one or two months? Explain your answer. [2]

LIST OF SOURCES

Hoyer, WD, MacInnis, DJ, and Pieters, R. 2018. Consumer Behavior. Seventh edition. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Old Spice Man case study: Hollie Shaw, “Old Spice Guy Beats Fabio in ‘Mano a Mano’ Contest,” Advertising Age, July 28, 2011, www.adage.com; Craig Reiss, “Businesses Can Learn from the Old Spice Man Viral Marketing Campaign,” Entrepreneur, July 18, 2010, www.entrepreneur. com; Gary Vaynerchuk, “Old Spice Man Marketing, Redux,” Fast Company, March 10, 2011, www.fastcompany.com; Jack Neff, “Old Spice Is Killing It on YouTube Again, But Sales Are Down Double-Digits,” Advertising Age, August 4, 2011, www.adage. com; and Sebastian Joseph, “Old Spice Man Tour to Visit a City Near You,” Marketing Week (UK), October 7, 2011, www.marketingweek.co.uk.