What factors affect consumer's decisions?

When I started this blog I asked myself one question: What factors affect consumer's decisions? Now, after couple of blog posts and thorough research I can say that I have and answer to this question. Main factors that affect everyone’s decisions are based on cultural, social, personal and psychological differences between the people. Everyone is a mix of all the factors and the decisions are unique and different from person to person.

Source: mysocialgameplan.com

Cultural factors are factors that come from our culture and customs. In Management Study Guide research post it is stated that Subcultures (smaller divisions of one the same culture), Religion (Christianity, Hindu, Muslim, Judaism etc.) and even your Gender affect your decisions. That means that all the everyday things that we take for granted, subconsciously affect our decisions.

Social factors are the next major group of elements that take part in consumer decision making process. From Management Study Guide website I got a good idea  of how social differences affect us. Reference groups (people surrounding you in everyday life), family, role in society and social status (upper/middle/lower “class”) all affect our decisions. The way you see yourself in society changes yourway of decision making.

Personal factors include age, occupation and income and lifestyle. Age is quite straightforward, some products are made for one group of people, some for others. In this article on Marketing 91 it is stated that your occupation and income affect you, which makes sense because your income sets the limits to your buying power. Lifestyle is pretty flexible, it is all the decisions you personally make and shape according to your desires.

Psychological factors, as stated on Small Business website can be separated in two groups: ones you were born with and ones you acquire over time. Motivation and needs (hunger, thirst) affect you at the moment, or right before the buying, perception is the factor that is used in marketing (the way we see the product), learning (if you bought it once and you didn’t like it you won’t buy it again) and beliefs all affect your decisions from the psychological side of view.

So, we can see that many factors affect the way we decide between two sodas or two car types. Many parts of your life affect the way you conceive products and for the most cases the decision making process is preprogrammed or subconscious. From your religion to your buying power and even your role in society, everything in your life affects the way you decide between two products.