Consumer Psychology in the Digital Age

In the digital age, consumers’ psychology and behavior of purchasing begin to take consumer demand as the lead, and consumers’ online shopping will have more power and freedom than in the past. In particular, they are able to find products that satisfy them globally based on their own characteristics and needs, regardless of geographical constraints. Because of this, in the 21st century all kinds of marketing network shopping development is the fastest and the most promising field. But in order to realize the personalized marketing in the digital age, it is necessary to deeply understand the purchasing psychology and behavior of consumers.

When we analyze consumer psychology, we often analyze and summarize it according to the background of the times. With the continuous development of the times, in fact, the network has gradually occupied most of people’s time. In today’s digital age, consumer values are at the heart of segmentation. Especially around the world today, the Internet is changing everyone’s life pattern, and the same consumer behavior, preferences, and purchasing psychology are changing with the pattern. Consumption values are the result of the combination of age, occupation, income, cultural quality and living area, indicating the willingness to choose.

The Sheth-Newman-Gross Consumer Value model demonstrates five factors, first of all, functional value. Functional value emphasizes the entity or functional value of the commodity itself. But today’s young people gradually become the mainstream consumer group, in fact, the functional value has changed a lot, many commodity entities have the value of spiritual needs than more levels.

Then there are social values. A product has social value when it enables consumers to connect with other social groups and provide utility. Research topics related to social values in the field of consumer behavior include social class, symbolic values, and reference groups. This is partly because today’s society is more visible than before, and consumers tend to be more inclined to live better than they were in the past. To the class, the symbol value manifestation.

Emotional value means that the choice of consumer may depend on the expression of consumer’s desire for emotion. The value obtained by consumer comes from the feeling or liking feeling of the selected product. Similar to many virtual games, or live game features will be one of the mainstream network consumption forms.

Cognitive value means that the consumer’s choice depends on whether the product has satisfied curiosity, freshness and pursuit of new knowledge, then the product has cognitive value. This kind of value is mainly reflected in people’s curiosity and exploration for new things. Consumers have good educational background, cognition, superfluous new products and new things.

Conditional value refers to the consumer’s choice in the face of a particular situation. Conditional values are not essentially held for a long time but are short-lived. Compared with the above four values, conditional value will be reflected in today’s consumer psychology is relatively small. But there are different contributions in different choice scenarios. Consumers may choose a good by only one of these five values, but in most cases by two. Up, even five values.

Therefore, it is reasonable to divide and generalize the effective consumer psychology and behavior in accordance with the current social situation. Effective for different psychology and crowd to be more effective in post-propaganda and sales. In today’s era, many young people have become the main consumer groups. With their unique consumption concepts and psychology, they have become the research objects of many scholars and experts. One of the reasons for its particularity is the increasing consumer demand. In the era of new youth culture, the huge consumption structure leads them to need more material to meet their own needs. Second, perceptual consumption psychology and impulsive consumption behavior have led to more and more young people choosing to consume ahead of schedule, or even to consume excessively. The contradiction between the excessive consumption demand caused by the pursuit of freshness and the impulse to compare and the high consumption intensity caused by the economic independence and poor financial management ability makes the concept of “advanced consumption”, which seems like a castle in the air, unquestionable. In fact, analyzing the market and strategy is often the primary research object of many companies, but sales are ultimately sold to people, so the significance of studying consumer groups will be even greater, and the factor of consumer psychology is the most core part of it.

References:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sheth-Newman-Gross-Model-of-consumption-Values-According-to-this-model-there-are-five_fig1_318596169(Sheth Newman Gross Model of consumption Values)

Sheth, J.N., Newman, B.I. and Gross, B.L. (1991) Consumption Values and Market Choices: Theory and Applications. South Western, Cincinnati.

Carissa J. Morgan, Candace C. Croney, Nicole J. Olynk Widmar, Exploring Relationships between Ethical Consumption, Lifestyle Choices, and Social Responsibility, Advances in Applied Sociology Vol.6 No.5, May 13, 2016

Jagdish N.ShethBruce I.NewmanBarbara L.Gross, Why we buy what we buy: A theory of consumption values, Journal of Business Research, Volume 22, Issue 2, March 1991, Pages 159-170