What is customer behavior? Well it’s the study of how people make decisions about what they buy, want, need, or act in regards to a product, service, or company. Still confused don’t worry I have two articles showing how customer behavior is being used in the food industry.
Now that you have the rough definition, for customer behavior let me explain how it’s being used and manipulated in the food industry. If you have ever gone to a grocery store, then your data on what products you bought have been recorded. Why this is so valuable? Well, let’s see, a giant collection of data that tells them how people spend their money. Yeah I would say this is pretty important because there job is to direct you to a specific product or service and if they have a giant collection of how you react to marketing, they can then draw correlation to what people in your age group, culture and many other macro-environmental elements you belong too. They, in turn, use this data to try and understand how they can manipulate your values and guide your purchase to their product or service.
Now in the articles that I’ve linked below, they show the data collection that, I lightly talked about previously and how they are using to conclude how they can implement this data in the store. For example, the most bought items in a grocery store are milk and bread. The longer a customer stays in a store the more they buy. So how do they use these two data sets in reality. well have you ever wonder why the milk and bread are usually on opposite sides of the store. The desired effect is that you go to the store need only milk and bread you grab your milk and begin to walk through the store, but you start to see that there is a deal on some chicken you. You weren’t wanting chicken but how can you resist this deal and you need to eat so you grab the chicken and maybe some other items on the way to your bread. So let’s see what happened to you, you did not want chicken but you bought it because of the deal and if the milk and bread were not on other sides of the store you would have never been exposed to this deal, that is the power of customer behavior. So now I hope that this example explains how important this data is because it;s a very big factor. The example above is a situational factor called shopping situation, where you are ready to buy something but marketers use adding value to the product.
Now the most important step in the buying process to marketers and customers alike, in my opinion, is the postpurchase step. Now you're asking yourself why is it so important, well this is the only step in which the consumer, is a guaranteed customer in the second article they talk about something called cognitive dissonance, which is when you buy a product and then feel that you made a bad purchase, this is also called buyers remorse.
This is a very important opportunity for the marketer to satisfy their customers and make them a return customer so how do they do this well they usually send thank you letters or other ways of positive reinforcement. Now this ties into the second article, I linked they explain why at most grocery stores they have the candy at the front, well it's to combat the buyer's remorse. In the article, they show data that most people that buy a candy bar or some type of candy are shown to not have as much buyers remorse or act on it less.
In conclusion, the way that the food industry is using customer behavior is the foundation of almost every single decision made even down to the store layout because it gets results. Ironically everybody is being manipulated by this data us and the marketers that is just how valuable customer behavior is.
Article 1
Nejad, F. M., Samadi, S., Ashraf, Y. A. P., & Tolabi, Z. (2015). Affecting Factors of Consumers’ Intent to Buy in the Food Industry by Emphasizing Brand Experience (Case Study: Mashhad TABAROK Company). Iranian Journal of Management Studies, 8(2), 243–263. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-com.owu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=11628997 5&site=ehost-live Article 2 Nowicki, P., & Sikora,, T. (2012, September).
Article 2
CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AT THE FOOD MARKET. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258889655_CONSUMER_BEHAVIOUR_AT_THE_F OOD_M
