The aim of Marketing is to meet and satisfy target customers’ needs and wants better than competitors. Successful marketing requires that companies fully connect with their customers. Adopting a holistic marketing orientation means understanding consumers – gaining a 360-degrees view of both their daily lives and the changes that occur during their lifetimes so that the right products are marketed to the right customers in the right way.
Connecting With Customers
Creating Customer Value, Satisfaction, & Loyalty
Analyzing Consumer Markets
Analyzing Business Markets
Identifying Market Segments and Targets

Consumer Behavior
• The study of how individuals, groups, and organizations select, buy, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and wants.

According to the book entitled Consumer Behavior: A Primer by Gail Tom – Selective reality is understanding the world from a consumers perspective. By understanding the consumer’s perspective, marketers can give consumers the right product, at the right price at the right time at the right place. But in so doing, are marketers merely reflecting the consumers subjective reality or are they unintentionally or maybe intentionally, also exaggerating, distorting, altering, the consumers needs and wants? And is this for the better or is this for the worst?
Cultural Factors - Culture, subculture, and social class are particularly important influences on consumer buying behavior. Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behavior. Through family and other key institutions, a child growing up is exposed to values such as: achievement and success, activity, efficiency and practicality, progress, material comfort, individualism, freedom, external comfort, humanitarianism, and youthfulness.
A child growing up in another country might have a different view