INTRODUCTION 1.

1 General intentions Complex buying behavior: - when the consumer is highly involved in the buying and there is significant differences between brands then it is called complex buying behavior. So in this case the consumer must collect proper information about the product features and the marketer must provide detailed information regarding the product attributes. For eg. Consumer, while buying a motor cycle is highly involved in the purchase and has the knowledge about significant differences between brands.

Variety seeking behavior: - in this case consumer involvement is low while buying the product but there are significant differences between brands. Consumers generally buy different products not due to dissatisfaction from the earlier product but due to seek variety. Like every time they buy different washing detergent just for variety. So it is the duty of the marketer to encourage the consumer to buy the product by offering those discounts, free samples and by advertising the product a lot.

Dissonance buying behavior: - here consumer is highly involved in the purchase but there are few differences between brands. Like consumer while buying a floor tiles buy them quickly as there are few differences between brands.

Habitual buying behavior: - in this case there is low involvement of the consumer and there are few differences between brands. The consumer buys the product quickly. For e.g. Toothpaste. A description of a population of consumers, who each choose (buy), repeatedly one of a number of competing brands (we can ignore the deference between product and brand for these purposes). This subdivides into a description of the behavior of a single consumer (psychology), and of the collective behavior of a group, in other words of the interactions between consumers (sociology).

A description of brand management, i.e. the strategy of brand managers when changing the attributes of a brand such as price or quality in response to events in the marketplace. Traditional marketing models tend to focus on the second element, and treat the large number of consumers in a macroscopic, averaged way. Alternatively, one can look at individual consumers and their buying behaviour, and try to derive observable large scale eects, like changes in market share. Ideally one would like to connect the microscopic consumer viewpoint to the macroscopic viewpoint of the brand manager.

1.2 Factors in the models The main features which were included in the various models are: A. Loyalty Loyalty is the tendency for (some) consumers to stick to the same products. With this as a key eect, deterministic, continuous-time models will be systems of ordinary deferential equations; the stronger the loyalty, the slower the changes in numbers of people buying particular products. For discrete-time models, the degree of loyalty corresponds to the size of diagonal elements in a transition matrix. On the other hand, with no loyalty (or inuence of other people) whatsoever, market share or chance of someone making a particular purchase has no dynamic behaviour and would instead depend only upon what is currently on the supermarket shelves. Another aspect of loyalty, not allowed for in our models so far, would be a memory eect, to represent people returning to products they had previously used, after trying something new they then didnt like. This could be taken into account perhaps by using recurrence relations or deferential equations of higher than the order (or even employing delay-dierential equations). B. Sociology Sociology in this context is concerned with how one persons buying is inuenced by that of others. With some sort of tendency of people to buy the same brands, there is a possibility of lock-in, with one product dominating the market, even if its competitors have more or less identical qualities (including price). This eect and its opposite, people wanting to be dierent, are easily modelled by ODE and discrete-time models.

C. Psychology Psychology covers what, and how, aspects of the actual items on the shelves inuence people to make their choices, possibly buying something dierent from previously. (Advertising might be subsumed into these characteristics but could also possibly be considered as part of the sociological inuences, especially if the advertising takes the form of a well known gure endorsing a product.) More specically, the following four properties have been identied by Unilever as being important and their inuences wereincluded in one or more models:

1. Minimize anticipated regret. This refers to how just two products compare with each other as regards dierent qualities, which can include price (or adorability = 1/price). A consumer might judge one item to be superior to another in all respects. The rest is then a safe choice for the consumer. 2. Attribute change. The introduction of a new product onto the market can change the way consumers, or at least some of them, view established brands. This might be by drawing attention to some quality which was not previously much regarded, or it might make people give dierent weightings to the (established) qualities when making their decisions. The former can be considered to be a special case of the latter. 3. Outlier avoidance. When a number of products are in many aspects quite similar, there can be a tendency for people to avoid strange ones, i.e. others which are substantially dierent from the majority in price or some other respect. Items near the average can be favored. 4. Decision process change. A straight choice between two items might be relatively easy; they can be compared according to price, size etc. and a decision made. With three or more, comparisons might be made between two things at a time, one could be eliminated and then the winner contrasted with a third.