The consumer behavior model assignment is on Part A: Introduction to Consumer Behavior. In this assignment, each student is required to apply the consumer behavior model with its four constructs/parts (psychological core, consumer culture, decision making process, and consumer behaviour outcomes) to a specific real life situation where the student (as a consumer or a customer) has made a high-consumer effort decision or a purchase (e.g., joining college, selecting a major, buying a house, buying a laptop, buying a car). This assignment allows the students to try out their marketing analytical and applied skills in addition to the benefit of understanding the whole consumer behavior model or framework that would be our focus during the whole semester/session. In addition, this assignment is very important and should provide you with hand-on experience in applying the concepts and methods of consumer behavior to the real life.
Here are further guidelines about this assignment:
1- 1- This assignment should be in an essay format and must be 3-4 pages (double spaced). You need to remember that it should not be a story telling assignment, but an application of the consumer behavior model to a specific decision that you made.
2- 2- You should apply the consumer behavior model/framework (in Page 1 in the textbook or slide # 10 in Chapter 1 slides) to a specific decision that you made:
a- The decision must be specific, not general (it should be pertaining to a specific car (e.g.) that was bought not just about buying a car.
b- The decision must be pertaining to you, not to anybody else. It means that you are the one who made this decision, not somebody else.
c- The decision must be made (in the past tense). It means that you already joined the college or picked the major or bought the car or laptop.
3- 3- You need to apply and use as many terms in the model/framework as possible to this decision throughout the four parts of the model and bold the consumer behavior model terms that you use:
a- For example, you need to integrate the psychological core variables/ terms, which include: motivation, ability opportunity, exposure, attention, perception, categorization of information, comprehension, attitude, memory, and retrieval. For the decision making process, you need to integrate all five stages: need/problem recognition, information search, judgment (or evaluation of alternatives), making decision, and post-decision process (or decision evaluation; e.g., satisfaction vs. dissatisfaction). The same would be with consumer behavior outcomes and consumer culture variables/ terms (regional, religious, ethnic influences, social class, social influences, age, gender, household, psychographics, values, personalityetc).
b- You need to bold all the terms that you use. It is very important. You will get deduction in points in your grade if you do not bold the terms that you use. Bolding the terms is the only way that you prove to me that you intentionally used and applied these terms to the specific decision that you made.
c- To get a very good grade in this assignment, you need to prove to me that you are going the extra mile to excel in your performance. I suggest that you go through the book chapters, dig further, and use some terms that you find applicable to your decision in the different chapters in the text (e.g., enduring involvement, cognitive involvement, schema, salience attributes of attitude, anchoring and adjustment.).
4- 4- You need to exemplify how the different terms of the model/framework are integrated across the four parts/constructs of the model/framework (e.g., the regional and weather influences had a positive impact on highly motivating me to search for information to buy a 4 wheel drive to be ready for the winter). In this case, you exemplified how regional influences (consumer culture variable) motivated (psychological core variable) me to search for information (the second stage in the decision making process) to buy a 4 wheel drive to be ready for winter.
