4. Psychological Factors: A person’s buying situation are further influenced by four major types of psychological factors; motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitude.
Motivation: A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction. Psychologists have developed theories of human motivation.
Perception: Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret and information to form a meaningful picture of the world. People from different perceptions of the same stimulus because of three perceptual processes;
Selective attention: Selective attention is the tendency for people to screen out most of the information to which they are exposed—means that marketers must work especially hard to attract the consumer’s attention.
Selective distortion: Selective distortion describes the tendency of people to interpret information in a way that will support what they already believe.
Selective retention: Consumers are likely to remember good points made about a brand they favor and to forget good points made about competing brands.
Learning: Learning describes changes in an individual’s behavior arising from experience. Learning theorists say that most human behavior is learned. Learning occurs through the interplay of drives, stimuli, cues, responses and reinforcement.
Beliefs and attitudes: A belief is a descriptive thought that a person has about something. Beliefs may be based on real knowledge, opinion and or faith and may or may not carry an emotional charge.
Attitude describes a person’s relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or idea. Attitudes put people into a frame of mind of liking or disliking things of moving toward or away from them.
