research

Audience Awareness and Purpose
Let’s say you’ve just had a terrible experience with Parking Management and decide to write a letter to The Collegian to complain about this campus service. As you think about writing your letter to The Collegian, you’ll need to think not only about audience but also about why you are writing to those readers. Do you want simply to tell your story? Do you want to argue directly for a change in policy? Do you want to raise fellow students’ consciousness about a problem so that the student senate will eventually take up the issue? Depending on your goal, you might write a narrative, an argument, or a causal analysis. Which approach is most likely to be effective with your readers?

Writers need to consider both audience and purpose in writing because the two elements affect the paper so significantly, and decisions about one will affect the other.
Developing Audience Awareness
When we talk to someone face-to-face, we always know just who we're talking to. We automatically adjust our speech to be sure we communicate our message. For instance, when we talk to three-year olds, we shorten sentences and use simpler words. When we talk to college professors, we use longer sentences and more formal language.

In short, we change what we say because we know our audience.

Interestingly, many writers don’t make the same adjustments when they write to different audiences, usually because they don’t take the time to think about who will be reading what they write. But to be sure that we communicate clearly in writing, we need to adjust our message--how we say it and what information we include--by recognizing that different readers can best understand different messages.

product reach

In consumer marketing 'Product Reach' has to do with the Distribution of the product. One of the four 'Ps' of Marketing Mix. It depicts on the availability of your product to the target market.
The more effective the distribution the more is your product reach to the customers at different stores and places and town and villages.

Audience profiling
A target audience profile (TAP) is a written and very detailed appraisal of your customers' characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors. TAP information typically falls into two categories: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics describe who your customers are. The most frequently used demographic variables include age, gender, occupation, location, marital status, income, education level, and nationality.
Psychographics describe why your customers act as they do. For example, you might determine that you have price-sensitive customers who choose the least expensive option, or trend-conscious customers who prefer the newest, most fashionable option, or early adopters who are open to choosing new, unproven options.
Why do I need to do TAPs?
Sharing high-quality customer profiles across your organization pays off in several important ways. Target audience profiles:

Help the company make better, more consistent customer decisions about how to best market and sell, including which products and services to offer and how to most effectively communicate their features, benefits, and availability.
Reduce confusion among functional areas through a common business foundation for decision-making.
Make it possible for your staff to treat customers more consistently because everyone is working from the same comprehensive information.
Save time and money by minimizing missteps and rework stemming from inconsistent knowledge about the customer base.
Improve overall marketing focus and communication effectiveness.
Who needs to use TAPs?
Traditionally, TAPs are used mostly by marketing communications (marcom) departments. Indeed, marcom departments need highly detailed customer profiles in order to generate effective communications. TAPs do, however, merit a much wider audience.

Everyone in marketing needs — and should demand — this level of information. A clear and accurate understanding of one's customers fosters better market research, better products and services, better marketing strategies, and better communications. In fact, good customer information extends beyond marketing into virtually every functional area of your company.

TAP fundamentals
Before you start building your TAPs, take the time to consider such things as how many TAPs you need, who you need to profile, and how much detail to include in your profiles.

How many TAPs do I need to create?
The answer to this question depends on your objectives. There is no one comprehensive TAP that contains all your customer information insights. You need to produce multiple TAPs as needs arise.

If you're trying to increase the average revenue per current customer, you need to profile existing customers. If you're preparing a communications plan for your expansion into new market segments, you need to profile prospective customers.

Which customers do I need to profile?
Everyone involved in the purchase process should be profiled. Customers can usually be segregated into two categories: decision-makers and influencers.

Decision-makers might include "Mom" or "CIO." Influencers might include "teenager" or "systems analyst." You must understand the specific characteristics of each category and the relationship between them. What are their relevant needs, goals, beliefs, fears, and selection criteria? Where do they get information? Who initiates the purchase?

How detailed does a TAP need to be?
The level of detail depends on the breadth of the customer segment under consideration. TAPs can be prepared for an entire company, for a product line, or for a particular product.

On the one hand, the greater the breadth of the customer segment (that is, company-wide), the more general the information needs to be. On the other hand, TAPs for a particular product or service needs to be quite specific

Consumer behaviour
Consumer behaviour referred to as the study of when, why, how, where and what people do or do not buy products.[1] It blends elements from psychology, sociology,social, anthropology and economics. It attempts to understand the buyer decision making process, both individually and in groups. It studies characteristics of individual consumers such as demographics and behavioural variables in an attempt to understand people's wants. It also tries to assess influences on the consumer from groups such as family, friends, reference groups, and society in general.

Customer behaviour study is based on consumer buying behaviour, with the customer playing the three distinct roles of user, payer and buyer. Relationship marketing is an influential asset for customer behaviour analysis as it has a keen interest in the re-discovery of the true meaning of marketing through the re-affirmation of the importance of the customer or buyer. A greater importance is also placed on consumer retention, customer relationship management, personalisation, customisation and one-to-one marketing. Social functions can be categorized into social choice and welfare functions.

Each method for vote counting is assumed as a social function but if Arrow’s possibility theorem is used for a social function, social welfare function is achieved. Some specifications of the social functions are decisiveness, neutrality, anonymity, monotonocity, unanimity, homogeneity and weak and strong Pareto optimality. No social choice function meets these requirements in an ordinal scale simultaneously. The most important characteristic of a social function is identification of the interactive effect of alternatives and creating a logical relation with the ranks. Marketing provides services in order to satisfy customers. With that in mind, the productive system is considered from its beginning at the production level, to the end of the cycle, the consumer (Kioumarsi et al., 2009).

Consumer Attitudes
What Can Attitudes tell us about Consumers?
Consumers who like sushi are likely to eat it
Consumers who like rich ice cream are likely to eat it
Consumers who like to “eat healthy” will be likely to eat things that are not high in calories

In reality . . .
BUT – having a positive attitude does not mean that we’ll buy a specific product
We distinguish between attitude toward the object and attitude toward the behavior of purchase

What is an Attitude?
It represents what we like and dislike
An attitude is a lasting general evaluation of something - it has knowledge of that something, liking or disliking, and the strength of the feelings.
They are lasting, but changeable
They help to direct behavior – e.g. do you recycle cans?

What functions do attitudes provide?
Utilitarian -does the clothing fit, is it appropriate, does it provide what we need?
Value-expressive: clothing says that you are a professional
Ego-expressive: clothing conveys self-image
Knowledge: summarizes the image we are trying to give, a suit from _______ conveys that you are a professional

The Variety of Consumer Attitudes
Attitudes toward product – Campbell Soup at hand
Attitudes toward company - Philip Morris, Kraft
Attitudes toward a retailer – Wal Mart
Attitudes toward product attributes – salt content
Attitudes toward various types of brand associations
Logos – design – do you like the Nike swoosh?
Symbols – meanings – do you like the Energizer bunny?
Product endorsers – sports figures – do you like Michael Jordan?
Attitudes toward advertising – do you like the ads for the Borgata?
Attitudes: Likes and Dislikes
Beliefs - now that the consumer has learned about our product, we assess their belief system ( may be multiple attributes - running shoe)
Affect (feelings) - whether they like or dislike each attribute which they know?
Behavior - what they do in response
Impact of valued other people
Behavioral intentions vs. Behavior
Beliefs: Cognitive Component of Consumer Attitude
A consumer belief is a psychological association between a product or brand and an attribute or feature of that product or brand
Beliefs are cognitive (based on knowledge)
The stronger the association of features or attributes with the product or brand, the stronger the consumer’s belief
Are the consumers’ beliefs correct?
Affect: Emotive Component of Attitude
Purchase decisions are continually influenced by affective response
Affect—the way in which we feel in response to marketplace stimuli
It is emotive rather than cognitive (beliefs)
It is comprised of both our knowledge of stimuli and our evaluations of them
Affective responses can be very general or very specific
Affective component of attitude: functional theory of attitude, the Fishbein model, and the belief-importance model
The Fishbein Model - discussed in class
An Application of the Fishbein Model
The Fishbein Model—Changing Affective Responses
Change Bi - if the belief is that durability is weak, find out why? Is this true or just a rumor? Can we change the belief?
Change Ei – if consumers don’t like an attribute, can we change their feeling? If they dislike paying over $50, can we explain why it’s worth it? Can we give them rebates?
Add a new Bi/Ei combination – are there other beliefs or attributes that could be added?
Intention: Behavior Component of Consumer Attitude
Affect is not closely linked to actual purchase
Behavioral intention—attitude toward brand purchase
A far better predictor of behavior than either beliefs or affective responses
Behavioral intention models:
Theory of reasoned action
Theory of trying