Global Consumer Behaviour
Global consumer behavior refers to the homogenous behavior of consumer towards high-quality products at affordable price. Due to increasing access to information and equal availability of technical resources empowered consumers in this consumer-centric marketing era.
At the beginning of globalization scenario, many firms had expected that under the global effect consumer will behave homogenously and might demand for similar products. But in real terms, consumers do not behave rationally. There are vast differences in term of values and culture. Mooij, (2003) mentioned that companies who ignored the influence of cultural values on demand were failed to increased efficiency and finally results in declining profitability in the global market. He further argued that after declining profitability, Coca-Cola decided to move closer to the local market.
Coca-Cola’s CEO was quoted in the Financial Times (27 March 2000) as stating that ‘We kept standardizing our practices, while local sensitivity had become absolutely essential to success.’ Coca-Cola’s marketing chief stated that the firm’s ‘big successes have come from markets where we read the consumer psyche every day and adjust the marketing model every day’ (Mooij, 2003).
The be successful firm in the consumer-centric environment, understand demographic, cultural as well as psychological differences are highly important for marketing practitioners. The internet will definitely play an important role to develop a closer relation with the consumer. With the help of digital platforms, marketers must try to understand the differences and how this differences influence consumer buying behavior. Lee (2006) advocated that Marketing managers should consider actual consumer purchases to investigate what, where, and why they make a purchase. On top of it, strategic experts should consider the cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors that have positive and/or negative influence on buyer’s decision process.
Regular use of social media removes hesitation to share feedback with rest of the world. Marketing practitioners should take advantage of this all changing habits. They should develop social media platform to get feedback from consumers so that the can able to make changes in their marketing strategies. As a smart businessman, they should have their eyes on competitor social media campaigns. Digital era creates more transparency in terms of market offers and consumer feedback, which increase difficulties for strategic managers, how to introduce competitive strategies in the market is a big question. On the other hand, to sustain consumer loyalty is a become more difficult day by day. Marketers should need to update their information every second and should work hard on every single consumer feedback to increase profitability.
Markers need to understand consumer differences which directly affect consumer buying behavior. Companies should develop digital marketing communication massages to create awareness, build relation and develop the brand image to sustain business in this highly competitive era.
References:
Mooij, M. D. (2003). Convergence and divergence in consumer behaviour: implications for
global advertising. International Journal of Advertising, 22(2), pp. 183–202. ISSN: 0265-0487 (Print) 1759-3948 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rina20
Lee, J. W. (2006). A Motivation-Experience-Performance Model to Understand Global
Consumer Behavior on the Internet. Journal of Transnational Management, 11(3), pp. 81- 100. doi:10.1300/J482v11n03_05
Laroche, M. (2014). New developments in global consumer behavior and marketing strategy:
Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Business Research, 67, pp. 225–227.
doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.05.007
