MT459 Unit 2 Purchase Decision Process Analysis Example

One Question at the Shelter Door: An MT459 Unit 2 Purchase Decision Analysis of a Novice's First Litter

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT459: Consumer Behavior

Unit 2 Purchase Decision Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Linwood Pet Supply, the buyer, her purchase and the interview are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Purchase

On a Saturday in July, a 26-year-old graphic designer adopted a two-year-old cat from a shelter. The shelter gave her a printed checklist: litter, a box, food and a carrier. Within the hour she was in a Linwood Pet Supply store, where she bought a 20-pound bag of clumping clay litter, a covered box and a bag of food. She had never owned a cat. The analysis draws on a short interview with her two weeks later and on her receipt.

The Model

The course text lays out a five-stage decision sequence, from recognizing a need, through searching and weighing options, to the purchase itself and a later verdict on it (Solomon, 2020). The stage table lists the five stages in its left column, what the model predicts for a novice facing a new category in the middle and what this buyer actually did on the right. A reader can see at once which cells stayed nearly empty.

Need Recognition

In the model, a decision starts when a consumer feels that something is missing, that where they are falls short of where they want to be. For this buyer, no gap was felt. She had no cat yet and no sense of what litter did. The need arrived on a printed list from the shelter. The checklist created the need before any want existed, which matters for a retailer: the shelter's checklist, not the shopper, set the category.

Information Search

For a novice in an unfamiliar category with 38 litter products on the shelf, the model predicts extensive search: reading packages, asking staff, checking reviews. She did none of it. Her entire search was one question at the shelter door. As she left with the cat, she asked the volunteer what litter to buy, and the volunteer named a brand of unscented clumping clay.

Evaluation of Alternatives

The model predicts that a buyer compares options on attributes such as price, scent, clumping and dust. Evaluation never happened. In the store she scanned the shelf for the brand the volunteer had named, found it at eye level and took the 20-pound bag. She did not notice the price, the lightweight versions or the scented ones next to it. Asked two weeks later what the bag had cost, she guessed about half the actual price, and she could not name a single other brand from the aisle, although she had stood in front of all of them.

Thirty-eight options sat on the shelf, and she looked for exactly one name.

Two Shortcuts

Two shortcuts carried the decision. The first is reliance on an expert: the volunteer, wearing a shelter shirt and handing over a cat, carried authority on everything to do with cats. The buyer said, "She does this every day; I figured she knew." The second is brand recognition at the shelf: once she had a name, finding it was a matter of matching a logo. Hoyer (1984) found that buyers of common repeat-purchase products spend only seconds choosing in the store and rely on simple rules rather than comparison, and a novice with an expert's recommendation has an even simpler rule available.

Purchase and Repurchase

The purchase itself was quick. Post-purchase evaluation, in the model, compares experience with expectation. She had no expectation beyond "the cat uses it," and the cat did. For the next fourteen months she repurchased the same product every three weeks, first in the store and then on auto-ship, without comparing it with anything. In the model's terms, the decision moved straight from a one-time, almost borrowed choice into habit.

What This Means for the Model

The five stages are not wrong; they describe what a decision would look like if the buyer did all the work herself. This buyer handed most of the work to someone else. Payne et al. (1993) describe consumers as adaptive decision makers who choose how much effort to spend based on the situation, and for a new cat owner with a cat in a carrier, the right amount of effort at that moment was almost none.

What a Retailer Could Learn

For Linwood, the lesson is that the purchase was decided before the buyer entered the store. The shelter's checklist and the volunteer's answer set both the category and the brand. The same pattern probably holds for food, carriers and boxes on the shelter's list, since each item arrived in the store already named. A retailer that wants to reach new owners would do better to work with shelters on the checklist, and to make sure the volunteers' preferred products are easy to find at eye level, than to compete for attention in an aisle the novice never actually reads.

References

Hoyer, W. D. (1984). An examination of consumer decision making for a common repeat purchase product. Journal of Consumer Research, 11(3), 822-829. https://doi.org/10.1086/209017

Payne, J. W., Bettman, J. R., & Johnson, E. J. (1993). The adaptive decision maker. Cambridge University Press.

Solomon, M. R. (2020). Consumer behavior: Buying, having, and being (13th ed.). Pearson.