Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age: A Deep Dive for Your Marketing Dissertation

If a business wants to sell a service to a customer, their focus shouldn’t be on themselves. Listing out the benefits of the service or harping on their authenticity won’t get them anywhere. After all, if none of those benefits matters to the person, then they won't buy it. Trying to pitch the service to them is a waste of time and resources. That's why understanding consumer behavior is so important in marketing.

In this digital age, the way consumers deal with brands has changed significantly. They are now more informed. Information spreads like wildfire – whether it be good or bad. It influences the consumer's purchasing decisions. Unless you get into the nitty-gritty of consumer behavior, it'll be impossible to write a complex paper like a dissertation. In the end, you might even have to buy marketing dissertation from an online writing service. 

How Has Consumer Behavior Changed?

Before you consider getting dissertation help, let's try to understand why consumer buying trends have had such a drastic change. One of the first things to keep in mind when assessing consumer behavior is that it includes various factors, such as – 

• Social

• Psychological

• Cultural

It’s difficult to figure out why consumers’ attitudes towards purchasing have had a drastic change in the past few decades unless you cover all these factors. But let’s simplify things for you. Below, you’ll find a list of the major factors that have influenced purchasing decisions.

 Better access to information 

The days of brands or companies launching new services or products and expecting their customers to buy them without question are long gone. Now, consumers have the upper hand. Let's consider a simple example.

Suppose a new café opens in your neighborhood. During the first few days, it might not get enough footfall, except from the occasional curious adventurer. But the moment a popular food blogger leaves a good review regarding the café, people will start visiting the place. 

Instead of trusting the brands or companies, customers are more inclined to believe other customers. Now that they can readily access customer reviews and watch detailed videos of experts breaking down the pros and cons of the gadget, almost every person who decides to buy a product or service is well-informed before making any decision.  

 Dominance of mobile applications

Mobile phones have long become a necessity in people’s lives. There’s an app for almost everything! Want to order food? There are probably hundreds of food delivery apps on the app store. Need to order medicines? You can just download an app, upload the prescription, and get the medicines delivered to your doorstep. Mobile applications have completely dominated the field because people use their phones for everything. Opening a brand's website and placing orders from there on phones is quite difficult. That's why consumers are more prone to purchase through apps.

 Increase in e-commerce websites

Nowadays, most consumers prefer to shop online. That’s why e-commerce websites now dominate the market. The convenience of browsing through multiple options, checking reviews, and receiving personalized suggestions is hard to beat. E-commerce websites also offer competitive prices that you won’t get in stores. 

 Personal touch to services

The moment you land on a website, the platform will start collecting data so that you can receive personalized suggestions. Generally, the data collected includes the following – 

• Location

• Age

• Browsing data

• Time spent on each page

• Favorite products

• Card abandonment

If you visit a website for the first time, you won’t notice much. But once you visit it another time, the platform will recommend you things according to your preferences. This personalized touch makes browsing easier. 

 Increased power of social media

A strong social media presence is the key to building trust. Before buying a product, customers check reviews on the brand’s website as well as the comments on social media platforms. If a brand has 30K followers but barely any interactions on their posts, most customers avoid going forward with their purchases. After all, they’re aware that buying followers is rampant. So, the follower count doesn’t matter. The interactions do. Besides, social media influencers with significant following have good sway on people’s opinions regarding a brand. 

How Do Businesses Adapt to Changing Consumer Behavior?

There’s a popular saying that is quite apt in this context – “A rolling stone gathers no moss." When a business constantly adapts its marketing strategies by tracking consumer behavior, it will always get better traction than those that are adamant about sticking to the old-fashioned way will fall behind. 

The following strategies come in handy in this regard – 

 Building a strong social media presence

If a business wants to attract new customers, building a strong social media presence is a must. A high follower count should also translate into interactions. Posting interactive content, memes, reels, and customer reviews will surely give customers the opportunity to interact with your posts. But that’s not all, businesses should also – 

• Immediately address the concerns of customers who have complaints

• Collaborate with social media influencers to promote new products/services

Customers are more likely to trust a new business that makes its presence felt. 

 Adopting the e-commerce strategy

Now that customers are more inclined to shop online than visit stores in person, businesses must get into e-commerce. Having a website also increases trust. But more importantly, it makes the shopping experience better. Customers can take their time to browse through the various options. A secure payment gateway with multiple payment options is the cherry on top. Customers who have a seamless experience on a brand’s website are more likely to make repeat purchases.

 Utilizing data analytics for personalized services

Businesses can learn a lot from analyzing consumer data. They can assess the most popular products in a particular age group, the biggest demographic that uses their service, and issues that customers might be facing with their website. There's so much to learn! Using the information gathered from consumers, businesses can come up with targeted offers for a demographic, launch personalized emails, come up with new promotion tactics and even modify their pages for a better user experience. 

Cracking the Code

Understanding consumer preferences and buying patterns isn’t rocket science. But it’s still a time-consuming process since experts have to analyze huge chunks of data. Once a business cracks this code, they can come up with new strategies to fulfil their customer’s needs. But consumer behavior won’t always be consistent. It keeps changing depending on trends on the internet. So, businesses have to stay on their toes and adapt to the changes accordingly.