Marketing Environment and Consumer Behaviour
Scanning the environment
Candidates must handle the microenvironment (company, suppliers, intermediaries, customers, competitors, publics) and the macroenvironment using PESTLE - political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental. Know the difference between scanning, monitoring, forecasting and assessing. Understand SWOT as a tool that pairs internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats.
Consumer behaviour
Cover the buyer decision process: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, post-purchase behaviour (including cognitive dissonance). Influences divide into cultural (culture, subculture, social class), social (reference groups, family, roles and status), personal (age, occupation, lifestyle, personality) and psychological (motivation, perception, learning, beliefs and attitudes).
Key frameworks: Maslow's hierarchy; perceptual processes - selective attention, selective distortion, selective retention; buying roles - initiator, influencer, decider, buyer, user; and the buying centre in organisational buying, where derived demand and rational, longer cycles dominate.
Traps in questions
- Placing competitors in the macroenvironment - they are micro.
- Confusing selective distortion (interpreting information to fit beliefs) with selective retention (remembering only supportive information).
- Treating demographics as psychological factors.
- Ignoring post-purchase dissonance, which drives returns and complaints.
- Assuming organisational buyers are purely rational; personal risk and office politics matter.
Worked example
A supermarket chain faces a new sugar tax, an ageing population and a rival's price war. Sugar tax = political/legal; ageing population = social/demographic; rival = microenvironment competitor. Only the first two belong in PESTLE.
Rule of thumb
If the factor affects all firms in the industry equally and comes from outside, it is macro; if it is specific to the firm's value chain or rivals, it is micro.