Analysis Of Purchase Decision Making Process

On the 27th December 2017, I have made a high involvement decision, which is I decided to buy a laptop. In order to buy this laptop, I spent my two-year savings to buy it, which is the price of RM3600. It is significant to me because of the laptop's price for me is expensive and not easy to save the money as a student in nowadays. The significance importance of the laptop for me is it helps to facilitate my work task. This is because a laptop allows me to do the work in anytime and anywhere, whether in a library or at the friends' house. For example, with the presence of a laptop, I can access online to find the materials that I need in the classroom, including class notes, journal articles, online research, or software for creating videos to facilitate the work task. Besides, slides can also use to demonstrate the projects through a laptop. As long as my laptop has access to the internet, I can make my work easily and bring the convenience to me.

Prepurchase Stage

For the problem recognition step in the decision-making process, I realized that I have an unsatisfied need and require being satisfied. That was one day, when I was doing online research on my laptop, the malfunction of my laptop made me have a thought, that is, I had to buy a new laptop. In term of vision, I saw my laptop was suddenly broken down and cannot working at all. At that moment, buying a new laptop is an urgent matter for me. This is because I need the portability of my laptop in order to complete my college assignments whether at home or at college before the deadline. This is what I realized I have a problem that can be solved with a new laptop.

The second step of the decision-making process is the information search. In the step of information search, I started searching for information about new laptops that met my satisfaction. Therefore, I did internal research and external research. For the internal research, it refers to the consumer's memory or recall of the product, usually triggered or guided by personal experience. In other words, people will try to search their memories to see if they recall the past product, brand or service experience. It relates the memory’s role in learning during the pre-purchase decisions. Memory is the result of learning and involves information processing. Before we decided to buy a laptop, the most common thing was that the information went directly into short-term memory (STM) for processing, where two basic activities took place, namely maintenance rehearsal and elaborative activities. Maintenance rehearsal is to repeat a message in order to save it in the current memory. For example, in terms of the evaluation of the alternative step in the decision-making process, I will keep all the internal and external information searches in my mind in order to know and understand all the information from different types of laptops. At here, the elaborative activities also assist the maintain rehearsals. The elaborative activity is to use stored experience, values, and feelings to interpret and evaluate all laptop information in the current memory. For example, the laptop I used before was the Acer brand, and my experience was very satisfied. Not only that, the Acer brand makes me felt quite familiar because its value is still worth nowadays. For the external research, when people have no prior knowledge of the product, it will cause them to seek information from a personal source (such as a word of mouth from a friend/family) and/or a public source (such as an online forum, consumer report) or a marketer external research (Boundless Marketing, 2018).

In term of perception, the first stage in the stage of perception is exposure. Exposure occurs when the stimulus enters the human environment and is within the sensory receptors. Exposure gives consumers the opportunity to focus on the information available. People are exposed to a large number of stimuli in their daily activities. An example of vision in perception, people may see the commercials, billboards, display ads when they are driving. Not only that, there are now hundreds of television channels, thousands of radio stations and countless magazines. For example, during the period of my laptop malfunction, I have seen and get the information of promotion for the different brands and types of the laptop in the magazine. In the situation of selective exposure, if I actively avoid certain marketing stimuli, this is called selective exposure, which is also known as advertising avoidance. Marketers always concern about it because of the failure to gain exposure from customers will lead to the loss of sales opportunities. For example, the way consumers shop when they enter the store is highly selective. In fact, one study found that people avoid touching the product in the aisles where they did not shop. So, marketers try to overcome avoidance by using product placements and hybrid ads. On the other hand, apart from ad avoidance, some consumers voluntarily seek marketing stimuli voluntarily. In this case, the exposure of the laptop advertisement online message can be voluntary. For example, I click on a banner or pop-up (click to browse) is being voluntarily exposed to the target website and its marketing message. I also deliberately visit the laptop company's home page and other marketer websites. For example, I want to buy a new laptop, so I might visit the manufacturer's website such as Acer website, hp website and dell website to seek for the most suitable brand for my new laptop.

Purchase Stage

The third step of the decision-making process is product choice. This is where the customer makes the final product choice and buys it. With the idea of buying a laptop, my family went with me to Tesco Ampang to buy the new laptop, which was not far from my house. At that time, the salesperson in the computer shop gave me a lot of opinions. For example, he told me that the Acer Aspire R 15 is the latest in Acer notebooks in 2017. Then, Acer laptop has amazing aesthetics, especially the Acer Aspire R 15 laptop. It is successful in a compact and sturdy structure. For example, its touchscreen features, long battery life, aluminum chassis, full HD multitouch screen with the modern IPS technology were surprises to me. So, at that moment, when the customer intends to buy the product, some marketers will promote the brand personality to customers. This is because when marketers actively promote brand characteristics to customers, customers will purchase because of the unique personality of the brand. For example, after comparing many brands of laptops, I found that the brand personality of the Acer laptop is competence, which means it is related to the attributes of reliability and effectiveness. Besides, in term of semiotics in the marketers’ perspective, the logo design, the shape and form of letters in laptop and company names are related to its fonts. So, the marketers will more promote on this aspect to customers. In fact, the proper fit between “acer” fonts with laptops increase the brand choices.

In the term of perception, attention occurs when the stimulus activates one or more sensory receptors and the resulting sensation enters the brain for processing. Attention is determined by three factors, which are stimulus, individuals and situation. The stimulus factor is the physical characteristics of the stimulus itself, such as size, color, position, information quality, novelty, etc. For example, I chose a black laptop. I chose the color of the black laptop because black represents and it is related to the meaning of power, strengths, authority, and sophisticated. For individual factors, there are individual characteristics such as motivation and ability. Motivation is the driving force created by consumer interests and needs. It can also be linked with perceptual vigilance. This is because consumers are conscious to notice the stimuli that relate to their needs. For example, I need a new laptop to complete my task, so I will very much notice of the laptop advertisement in order to fulfil my need, which is buying a new laptop. For the ability side, ability refers to the ability of individuals to participate and process information. Therefore, this ability is related to knowledge and familiarity with the laptop itself, branding or promotion. For situational factors, it includes stimuli in the environment other than local stimuli and temporary features of the environment-induced individuals. An example of the situational factor is time pressure or crowded shops. Clutter and program involvement are situational factors of particular concern by marketers. As a result, marketers can take advantage of all of these factors to better develop the stimuli that draw consumers' attention in today's messy environments. Therefore, combining all of the above reasons, I decided to buy an Acer Aspire laptop. Since I have already considered buying an Acer Aspire laptop, I went to the laptop store to buy it with credit card payment of RM3600.

Post-Purchase Stage

The last step of the decision-making process is post-purchase behavior. If consumers have positive post-purchase behavior, they will give positive feedback about the product and they are satisfied with the quality of the product. For example, I am satisfied with the performance of Acer laptops, so I will recommend this Acer brand laptop to my friends and relatives. Later, once they purchased the Acer laptop, they will become loyal customers by purchasing more Acer products. Conversely, if the consumer's post-purchase behavior is negative, they will be dissatisfied with the product and they may have negative feedback on the product. For example, if I am not satisfied with the Acer laptop, then I will advise my friends not to buy this brand of laptop, because of the experience is negative.

In terms of learning behavior theory, learning can also be divided into conditions or cognitive. There are two forms of conditional learning, namely classical and operant conditioning. Classical adjustment attempts to establish an association between stimuli such as the Acer brand and receive responses such as the behavior or sensation of the customer. For operant conditioning, it attempts to produce positive results. It mentions the link between the responses such as buying an Acer Aspire R15 laptop and receives the positive outcome such as customer satisfaction. If it links with the motivation method, the marketers can give some rewards to customers such as the discount coupon in order the customers will purchase more in the next time.

On the other hand, the cognitive learning theory is the learning of includes all mental activities of human beings in solving problems or coping with situations. One type of cognitive learning is suitable for the high involvement decision, which is observational learning. In the high involvement purchase, such as the purchase of a new Acer laptop, consumers may deliberately observe the styles of other people use the laptop in every day, including they will observe the advertising which is related to laptop advertising. These images not only enhance the understanding of the product, but may even affect the way the product is evaluated after the actual test of the laptop when customers require to test the laptop.

In the term of perception, interpretation usually involves consumer inferences. Inference helps to explain consumer use of quality signals. For example, a consumer may think that a higher price means that the quality of the product they purchase is higher. Not only that, the warranty of the product is another quality signal. This is due to the fact that the products that usually have a longer warranty usually represent a higher quality. Consumers infer that if the company does not have confidence in the quality of its products, it will not provide a longer warranty, as the warranty provided by the manufacturer will be expensive. For example, my Acer Aspire R 15 laptop comes with the 2 years warranty. If there is any malfunction in my laptop, I can take my laptop to the factory for repair at any time, and the maintenance fee is free.

Next, in term of the long-term memory (LTM) side, it is information from previous information processing that has been stored for future use. Consumers often organize information in long-term memories around the brand in the form of a brand schema. These schemas represent the brand's image in key characteristics, feelings, experiences, etc (Building Marketing Strategy, 2013). For example, after buying an Acer laptop, the Acer laptop left a good experience for me, which is my long-term memory. Long-term memory is seen as a permanent storage. It can store information in our minds. Marketers are particularly targeting in semantic memory, which is the basic knowledge of individuals about the concept. It represents people's simplest level of understanding of the objects or events. So, the touch-screen laptops such as the Acer Aspire R 15 might be classified as "high-tech laptops."

In summary, I bought a new laptop because of the laptop malfunction. The internal factors that I have used in the prepurchase, purchase and post-purchase stage are perception, learning and memory, motivation, and personality. I am very satisfied because I finally purchased a new laptop that able to fulfill my need and desire.