By consumer behavior, we refer to the process of selection, purchase, and consumption of goods and services that satisfy their wants. Evaluating a consumer behavior is complex and involves different processes. In the beginning, a consumer tries to find ‘what’ he would like to consume, then he picks only those products that promise greater utility. Once the products have been selected, the consumer prepares an estimate of money which he can readily expend. And finally, he analyzes the current prices of the products and decides as to what he should purchase. Meanwhile, there are many other factors that affects the purchase decision of the consumer including social, cultural, personal and psychological factors. Mr. Tej Kohli has tried to explain all these factors below:

1. Cultural factors

   Consumer behavior is greatly affected by cultural factors like buyer culture, subculture and social status.

1. Culture: culture is an inherent part of every society and an important factor that influences a person’s wants and behavior. The affect of culture on consumer’s purchase decision varies from nation to nation. Hence, marketers have be extremely cautious in analyzing the culture of different regions or even nations.
2. Subculture : Every culture entails within itself various subcultures like religions, nationalities, geographical locations, races, castes and so on. Marketers can exploit these sects by demarcating the market into different small parts.
3. Social class: each society has some type of social class which hold importance for the marketers as the buying behavior of consumers in a particular social segment is similar. Thus, marketers can tailor their marketing activities according to their targeted social class. However, one thing that we should notice here is that social class is not only determined by income but several other including education, occupation, etc.

1. Social Factors

   Social factors also cast a significant influence on the consumer’s buying behavior. Some of the primary social factors are – reference groups, family, role and status.

1. Reference groups: Reference groups have a deep influence in shaping a person’s attitude. The impact of reference groups differ across various products and brands. For instance, a visible product like a dress, shoes car, etc will have a higher influence of reference groups. Opinion leaders are also a part of reference groups.
2. Family : A family member may also have strong impact on the buyer’s behavior. This is why, marketers are researching the roles and influence of various family members . If the buying decision in a particular commodity is influenced by children, then marketers will try to target kids in their advertisements. Also remember – buying roles will change as consumer lifestyles changes.
3. Roles and status: Every individual holds a exclusive role and status in the society depending to which group, family or organization he belongs. Say for instance, a woman is employed in a company as HR manager. Now she possesses three roles, one of HR manager, one of mother, and one of a wife. Hence, her buying decisions will be affected by her status and role in the society.

1. Personal Factors:

   Many personal factors such as age, lifestyle, occupation, economic situation, personality etc can also affect the consumer’s buying behavior.

1. Age : It is a well known fact that person’s buying behavior and habits undergo a drastic change with the passage of time. A family life-cycle consists of different stages ranging from young singles, married couples to retired people. This helps marketers to produce appropriate commodities for each stage.
2. Occupation: The occupation of an individual also has a potential impact on his behavior. The clothing needs of a marketing manager is a particular company will obviously be different from a laborer in the same company.
3. Economic Condition : This one is obvious! Is a consumer has higher income and savings, he is tend to spend more on expensive things. A low-income person, on the other hand, will go for cheaper products.
4. Lifestyle: It refers to the way an individual lives in a society and reflects through the things he has in his surroundings. This can be determined by consumer’s interests, opinions, activities and designs his whole pattern of acting and interacting in the society.
5. Personality : Personality varies from individual to individual, place to place and time to time. Most people assume personality as the outer appearance of a person, but this is wrong. Actually, personality is the totality of behavior of a person under various circumstances which can be characterized by various factors like dominance, aggressiveness, self-confidence among others. All these factors are useful in determining the consumer behavior for a specific product or service.

1. Psychological Factors

   The four primary psychological factors influencing the consumer behavior are: perception, motivation, beliefs and attitudes.

1. Motivation: every individual has different needs, be it psychological, biological or social. While some needs are very pressing, others are not. Thus, a need turns into a motive when it is most pressing to direct the individual to seek contentment.
2. Perception: perception is the process of selecting, organizing and interpreting information in a way that produces a purposeful experience of the society. Perceptual processes can be categorized into three parts – selective attention, selective distortion and selective retention. In selective attention, the marketers try to grab the consumer’s attention. Whereas, in selective distortion, consumer’s try to understand the information in a way that will support what the consumer already believe. Likewise, in selective retention, marketers try to hold information that support what they believe.
3. Beliefs and attitudes : every consumer has a particular belief and attitude towards different products. As such attitudes and beliefs create a brand’s image and influence consumer behavior, thus, marketers show their interest on them. On the other hand, marketers can launch exclusive campaigns to change the customer’s beliefs and attitudes.

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Let us now understand each stage closely:

1. Initial Customer Contact: This stage entails all the marketing, advertising and sales efforts done in order to appeal customers.

2. Customer Acquisition: One of the most crucial stages in the customer lifecycle, it is the phase where the customer is build. It involves an agreement between the customer and the organization to exchange money for the product.

3. Product use: It depends entirely on the nature of product. If the product has one-time use, it indicates that the customer needs to purchase the product again for next use. While, there are also products that can be used over and over again. Thus payment for the product can be made once or on recurrent basis.

4. Periodic contact: Once the product is under use, the customer may need to contact the company for a variety of reasons. Some of the most typical interaction forms are- Customer Service, Billing, Technical support and Sales call. It is the most crucial stage where the whole process makes or breaks. It is always sensible to employ some high-tech CRM applications that reduce the manual work and streamlines the whole operation. It is cost effective and saves time too.

5. Product upgrade: There is a constant need to upgrade the product so as to retain a customer. As a basic tendency the customers swap over products frequently. Thus, it’s imperative for a company to maintain a well managed product portfolio that can address the ever changing needs of the customer.

6. Deprovisioning: Certainly the most overlooked aspect of customer lifecycle. Once the customer has discontinued the use of a particular product, there is still a lot more that needs to be taken care of. Especially, where service with a recurring billing has been provided, if the customer is not properly deprovisioned, there will be future costs resulting from either providing service that is not being paid for or from billing a customer who is not receiving service. In either case there are likely to be costly customer support calls and an unhappy customer. Customer deprovisioning, where appropriate, should be planned for and built into the product from the beginning.

Sequentially moving through all these stages, customer lifecycle comes to a complete circle.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

The Product Manager’s Handbook : The Complete Product Management Resource by Linda Gorchels

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Profitable Decision Making (3rd Edition) by Thomas T. Nagle

Winning at New Products: Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch, Third Edition by Robert G. Cooper

Harvard Business Review on Brand Management (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series) by Erich Joachimsthaler

How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon

Sales & Operations Planning — The How-To Handbook by Thomas Wallce

Software Product Management Essentials by Alyssa S. Dver

Retail Product Management by R. Varley

Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy

Product Development for the Service Sector: Lessons from Market Leaders by Robert G. Cooper

Harvard Business Review on Marketing by Harvard Business School Press

Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin 

• Assigning specific products or brands to be managed by single managers within an advertising or PR agency
• Product management is an organizational function within a company dealing with the product planning or product marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle

If you want to be a bad product manager, confuse product management with project management. The words are so close because the two concepts are so similar. Product managers should manage projects since they need to ensure that the projects get done. They’re both management roles (right?) so the skills and experience are virtually the same. Project managers just get in the way and try to take control of the project away from the product manager.

If you want to be a good product manager, learn the difference between product management and project management. Despite the similar names, there are big differences between product management and project management. Confusing them is common, even among those experienced in product development.

Project managers are responsible for the successful delivery of a project — a one-time endeavor with a goal, scope, deadline, budget, and other constraints. A project manager will work to align resources, manage issues and risks, and basically coordinate all of the various elements necessary to complete the project. As they relate to products, projects can be undertaken to build a product, to add new features to a product, or create new versions or extensions of a product. When the project is complete, the project manager will usually move move to a new project, which may be related to a different product.

Product managers are responsible for the overall and ongoing success of a product. Once the project to build the product is complete and the project manager has moved on, the product manager remains to manage the product through the entire lifecycle. Other projects related to the product may be initiated, with the product manager being the one constant stream throughout, defining the project goals and guiding the team to accomplish the business objectives that have been defined.

One challenge of the two roles is that they can appear to be at odds with each other. A product manager may want to add a lot of features to meet observed customer needs, but the project manager may want to keep scope as small as possible so that the project is delivered on time and under budget. Traditional definitions (and probably those above, too) often mischaracterize the project manager as singularly focused on getting the project finished on time and under budget without any concern as to whether it meets the market or customer needs.

Good product managers and good project managers are able to create a balance of these conflicts. Good project managers know that the true success of a project is not whether it is on time and within budget, but whether it meets the defined goals and objectives. Good product managers know that all the features in the world will not matter if the project is continually delayed and never makes it to market or if it is too over budget to be completed.

Especially for web-based and technology products, the confusion between project and product management is common and potentially harmful to organizations who do not acknowledge the distinction.