Shopping behaviour, motivations and typologies

Hi Rob,

Really interesting stuff. As a fellow Marketing graduate you will probably agree that we sometimes take what we know for granted – so its great to reflect on some of the work that has gone into forming what we know about the world today! I hope you don't mind, but I just wanted to pull two really important sentences from your work:

“Marketing managers should try to seek and understand the motivational factors that affect his or her customer, as discussed in the wide range of studies into shopper motivations and typologies.”

“Marketing managers should also find ways that allow their customers to achieve their motivational aims.”

I just wanted to highlight these two sentences, because whilst us online folk talk a lot about enhancing relationships with customers by building upon the experience and using social media tools etc to engage them, it is understanding and fulfilling (without hassle) the customers motivational aims that are absolutely fundamental to what a business does.

Sometimes I think it is really important for a business to stop and think about why they do the things they do. From here they can ask themselves some really important questions: Are we fulfilling our customer expectations? If not, do we need to adapt what we do, or target a different audience? Do our mass marketing strategies get the message across about how we fulfil our customers motivations? Are our customers actually motivated to form relationships with us?

Understanding customers motivations allows a company to allocate their resources effectively and identify the activities that actually add-value and it also makes it easier to embrac change. This understanding of customers motivations is one of the things that I think seperates the top companies from the rest.

Great work and thanks for sharing…its really getting the cogs whirring!

Cheers,

Jed