Ch. 6 - Consumer Decision Making

For marketers to even exist in a world where they don't know all the information on or about their market is like a blind man shopping for contacts.  Absolutely useless.  Even more so, it is critical to understand the consumer and the consumer behavior.  If you can predict how the consumer makes their decisions, game over, YOU WON!  For a company such as ESPN, consumer behavior isn't about purchasing decisions.  Its more about how the consumer uses their services.  ESPN being one of the primary sports broadcasting networks, their service would be to report sports news.

With that being said, the consumer decision making process is a useful tool.  Some parts of the process can be applied to ESPN and their consumers decision making process; yet given the type of service ESPN, the decision making process doesn't apply as it would for most consumer behavior.

The consumer decision making process starts with; need recognition.  Need recognition hands down is the most applicable part of the decision making process for ESPN to understand consumer behavior.  The consumer might not NEED to watch ESPN to catch up on their sports but a majority of ESPN's consumers desire or WANT to.  This behavior is triggered for most consumers by an external stimuli.(Best example of an external stimuli for those of you who don't read the marketing chapters is; someone saying "Did you see Lebron's dunk last night?" and it urges the other to go watch his dunk, via ESPN).

As far as the next couple parts for the consumer decision making process; information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and purchase evaluate, they could apply in minor and randoms ways.  However, for the most part, ESPN's consumers display, routine response behavior.  They frequently get their sports news from ESPN, especially because ESPN has a media awareness of 97%.  While most watch ESPN for the dependability and ease of making the decision of  "where to get my sports fix!"