Week 3: Consumer Behaviour and the Communication Process

Week 3 looks at how consumers perceive, process and respond to marketing messages. It covers the model of buyer behaviour and the factors that influence it, the buying decision process, the customer journey and customer experience (CX), brand experience, the hierarchy of effects models AIDA and DAGMAR, the adopter categories, and finally how to understand and create buyer personas.

Structure of the lecture:

• Consumer behaviour and the communication process: how consumers perceive, process and respond to messages.
• Introduction to customer journey mapping and customer experience (CX).
• Understanding and creating personas.

Consumer market and consumer buyer behaviour

The model of buyer behaviour

The central question for marketers is: how do consumers respond to the various marketing efforts the company might use? The model of buyer behaviour (a stimulus-response model, Kotler and Armstrong) has three parts:

Stimuli enter the buyer's "black box", where they are turned into observable responses. The black box is called that because marketers cannot directly see what happens inside the consumer's mind; they must understand the buyer's characteristics and decision process to predict the responses.

Factors influencing consumer behaviour

Buyer characteristics are influenced by four groups of factors, from broad to individual:

Cultural factors

• Culture: the set of basic values, perceptions, wants and behaviours learned by a member of society from family and other important institutions.
• Subculture: a group of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations.
• Social class: relatively permanent divisions in a society whose members share similar values, interests and behaviours.

Social factors

• Reference groups: groups that serve as points of reference in forming a person's attitudes and behaviour. Advertisers often use aspirational figures: the lecture shows Rolex ads with Roger Federer and David Beckham and Rolex sponsorship of ATP tennis, linking the watch to admired achievers.
• Family: family members strongly influence buyer behaviour; the family is the most important consumer reference group.
• Roles and status: a person belongs to many groups; his or her position in each group is defined by role and status. Example: a brand manager buys the kind of clothing that reflects her role and status in her company.

Personal factors

• Age and life-cycle stage, occupation and economic situation.
• Lifestyle: a person's pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interests and opinions (AIO).
• Personality: the unique psychological characteristics that distinguish a person or group; related to self-concept (people buy products that reflect who they are or want to be).

Psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes. The lecture illustrates motivation with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Maslow argues that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy; people try to satisfy the most pressing (lower) needs first, and when a need is satisfied, the next level becomes a motivator.

For advertisers, Maslow helps to choose the need an appeal addresses: insurance ads address safety, Rolex ads esteem and prestige, "Just Do It" self-actualization.

The five-step buying decision process

1. Problem (need) recognition: the consumer recognizes a need.
2. Information search: looking for information about ways to satisfy the need.
3. Evaluation and selection of alternatives.
4. Store choice and purchase.
5. Post-purchase processes: satisfaction or dissatisfaction, which feeds back into future need recognition and search.

The diagram shows feedback loops: consumers can go back to earlier stages (for example searching again after evaluation), and post-purchase experience feeds into the next decision.

The customer journey

• Rather than viewing buying only as a fixed set of stages, many marketers view it as a broader customer journey: the sum of the ongoing experiences customers have with a brand.
• The journey begins with brand awareness and ends with the customer advocating the brand, suggesting the product to others.
• The customer journey is unique to each customer.
• The sum of experiences throughout the journey shapes customers' continuing behaviour and attitude toward the brand.
• The marketer's goal is to deeply understand the journey by mapping customer touch points and experiences in detail (customer journey mapping).
• By understanding the journey, marketers can create brand experiences that lead to positive purchase behaviour, engagement and brand advocacy over time.

Customer experience (CX)

Why creating customer experience has become a leading management objective (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016):

• Many firms (KPMG, Amazon, Google) now have chief customer experience officers, CX vice presidents or CX managers responsible for creating and managing customer experience.
• Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, resulting in more complex customer journeys.
• Customer experiences are more social: peer customers also influence the experience.
• Firms have much less control over the experience and journey, which results in behaviours such as showrooming (examining a product in a physical store and then buying it elsewhere, often online, for a lower price).

Brand experience

Brand experience has four separate but related dimensions:

1. Sensory: what the brand does to the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste).
2. Affective: feelings and emotions the brand evokes.
3. Intellectual: thinking, curiosity and problem solving the brand stimulates.
4. Behavioural: physical actions and bodily experiences the brand triggers.

Hierarchy of effects: the AIDA model (Strong, 1925)

AIDA is one of a class of models known as hierarchy of effects models, which all imply that consumers move through a series of steps or stages when making purchase decisions. The funnel narrows at each step:

1. Attention (Awareness): the message must first get noticed.
2. Interest: the consumer becomes interested in the product.
3. Desire: interest turns into a desire to own it.
4. Action: the consumer buys (or takes another desired action).

DAGMAR (Colley, 1961)

Why DAGMAR is important:

• It provides a framework for setting and measuring advertising communication objectives.
• It connects to the psychology of the consumer: how they move from knowing about a brand to purchasing.
• It ties into broader theories of advertising effectiveness such as AIDA, but adds more structure and measurability.
• The 1961 publication was one of the earliest formal attempts to make advertising a measurable, objective-driven activity. The practical implication is that an advertising goal should be a communication task (for example "raise awareness from 20% to 50%") rather than only a sales figure.

Adopter categories (diffusion of innovations)

People differ greatly in their readiness to try new products. In each product area there are "consumption pioneers" and early adopters; other individuals adopt much later. Based on innovativeness, people can be classified into five categories, which together follow a bell-shaped curve over time:

Personas

• A persona reflects not only who the customer is, but also their behaviours, motivations, goals, challenges, and the role your product or service plays in their daily life.
• Personas help teams across marketing, product development, sales and UX to understand and relate to the audience, stay aligned on whom they are building for, and make better-informed decisions.

A buyer persona typically includes:

• Name
• Demographic information
• Short description / bio
• Pain points
• Goals and aspirations
• Expectations from the product or service
• Buying decision process and factors
• Commonly used media channels

Example persona: Tesla, "Eco-Elite Ethan"

The lecture shows two more persona templates: Emilia Bianchi (25, Milan, e-commerce shopper; needs family approval, loves luxury shops and jewellery, buys online easily; pain points include fear of losing family support) and Marie, the artist (26, London; wants to sell her art online; needs a suitable website and funding without debt; pain points include managing mailing and being one of many artists). Both show the same structure: profile, needs, habits or ideal experience, and pain points.

How personas link to the rest of the lecture: a persona makes the influencing factors (cultural, social, personal, psychological), the customer journey and the hierarchy of effects concrete for one representative customer, so that marketers can choose the right message and media for each stage.

Sources: Becker and Jaakkola (2020); Lemon and Verhoef (2016); Armstrong, Kotler and Opresnik (2022), Marketing: An Introduction.

Creating personas: origin and method (Cooper, 1999)

The section above defines a persona and lists what a buyer persona contains. The 2026-27 syllabus adds two questions: where the persona concept comes from and how a persona is actually created from research.

Cooper's argument at a general level:

• Cooper wrote about software and high-tech products. His complaint was that products were designed by and for engineers ("the inmates running the asylum"), which made them difficult for ordinary users.
• Teams that design for a vague "user" fall into the trap of the elastic user: everyone stretches the imaginary user to fit his or her own preferences, so the user can justify any feature.
• A persona replaces the elastic user with one specific person with specific goals. Cooper argued that designing precisely for one primary persona produces a better product than trying to please everybody a little.
• This approach is called goal-directed design: the focus is on what the user wants to achieve (goals), not on tasks or on the list of features the technology makes possible.
• Marketing later adopted the idea as the buyer persona. The logic stays the same: a concrete, named representative of a segment makes messages and media choices sharper than an average of demographic figures.

How to create a persona: six steps

1. Define the purpose and scope. Decide which decision the persona must support (a campaign, a website, a new product) and which market or segment it covers.
2. Collect research data. Combine qualitative sources (interviews, observation, customer service conversations, social listening) with quantitative sources (surveys, web and app analytics, CRM and purchase data).
3. Find behavioural patterns. Group customers by shared goals, motivations, behaviours and pain points, not only by age or income. Each meaningful pattern becomes a candidate persona.
4. Write the persona profile. Give it a name, a picture, demographics, a short bio, goals, pain points, expectations, buying decision process and preferred media channels (the template in the previous section). A typical quote helps the team remember the persona.
5. Prioritise. Choose a primary persona (the main design and communication target) and, if needed, secondary personas. A negative persona describes who the brand is deliberately not targeting.
6. Validate, share and update. Test the persona against new data, share it with marketing, sales, product and UX teams, and revise it when behaviour changes.

Proto-personas, research-based and data-driven personas

Using personas in advertising. A persona answers practical questions for the campaign: which pain point the message should address, which appeal fits the persona's motivation, which media channels reach the persona, and what the persona needs at each stage of the customer journey. Common mistakes are creating too many personas, basing them only on demographics, inventing them without research, and never updating them.

Customer journey mapping, moments of truth, and CX versus UX

The earlier section introduced the customer journey and the idea of mapping touch points. This section explains how a customer journey map is built and how it relates to customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX).

Typical stages of a journey map (names differ between companies; the logic is the same):

Types of touchpoints (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016): brand-owned (advertising, website, packaging), partner-owned (retailers, delivery companies, marketing agencies), customer-owned (the customer's own thoughts and actions, such as choosing a payment method) and social/external (other customers, reviews, peers). The brand controls only the first group fully, which is why IMC must also manage the others indirectly.

Steps to build a map:

1. Choose the persona and the scenario (for example a first purchase).
2. List all stages and the touchpoints in each stage, online and offline.
3. Add what the persona does, thinks and feels; an emotional curve shows highs and lows across stages.
4. Mark the pain points (moments of friction, doubt or frustration).
5. Translate pain points into opportunities and assign owners (marketing, product, service, IT).

Moments of truth

Moments of truth are the points in the journey where the customer forms or changes an impression of the brand, so they deserve extra attention in a journey map.

• Zero moment of truth (ZMOT): the online research before purchase (searching, reading reviews, watching videos). The term was popularised by Google.
• First moment of truth (FMOT): the first encounter with the product at the point of purchase, for example on the shelf or the product page. The term is associated with Procter and Gamble.
• Second moment of truth (SMOT): the experience of using the product, which shows whether the promise is kept.
• Ultimate moment of truth: the customer shares the experience (reviews, posts), which becomes the ZMOT of the next customer.

Customer experience (CX) versus user experience (UX)

UX is part of CX. A bank can have an excellent app (good UX) but a poor CX if the advertising promises personal service and the call centre is unreachable. For advertising this means that a campaign raises expectations that the rest of the journey must meet: a gap between the promise and the experience turns into a pain point and negative word of mouth.