Consumer Marketing And Complaining Behaviour

Introduction
Consumer Marketing is creating and selling the goods, services, products, experience, ideas
to the customers, in other word we can say buying the services for consumption. The
consumer market focuses on the customer who buy the products and services for
consumption and not for their resale. It consist of the demographic, Psychographic,
behaviouristic and geographic characteristics. These characteristics are define through market
segmentation.
Demographic characteristics
It includes differentiating the customers on the basis of age, gender, income, occupation,
education, religion, generation. Companies sometimes do market surveys to identify which
demographic group to target.
Psychographic characteristics
Customers are differentiating on the basis of their opinion, attitude, interest and values. Like
the sellers offers magazines like India today, Business India to the Business class of the
society, same way femina to the female section of the society. The marketers may understand
the opinions and interest of the society and design and campaign their offering accordingly.
Behaviouristic characteristics
The behaviouristic characteristic focuses on the users brand loyalty, how long they are using
their products, what benefits they are getting or seeking through the products. The marketers
are interested in knowing how frequently the customers are using their products , how
frequently they are visiting their stores, are the consumers switching their brands or buying
the same. Through this study they can find out and differentiate among heavy , medium and
light consumers.
Geographic characteristics
The market is differentiated on the basis of the geographic area like the climate, food habits,
housing according to the place where they live. For example, in hilly areas the houses and
building have slant roofs which is generally not found in plain regions, that is according to
the geographic demand, same way the food habits also differ from place to place, when you
move to west Bengal side you will get more to non-vegetarian and in Gujarat side more of
vegetarian food. This is how the customers are differentiated in respect to the geographic
conditions.

Complaining Behaviour can be defined , the response or the feedback the marketers get from the
consumers in case they are dissatisfied from their product. Dissatisfaction can be result of the not
fulfilment of the expectation that the consumers have from the product. The services and the
performances are not up to the mark. CCB has been related to several individual differences,
including age (e.g. Bearden and Mason, 1984), attitude towards complaining (e.g. Blodgett et al.,
1995; Richins, 1982), personal values (e.g. Rogers and Williams, 1990), personality (e.g. Beardon and
Mason, 1984; Harris and Mowen, 2001), and culture (e.g. Ngai et al, 2008). CCB research is
particularly relevant in service contexts, as the inherent intangibility of services can lead to differing
levels of expectations and perceptions of service (Ngai et al., 2008).

oblige

integrate

compromise

Concern for
others

avoid

dominate

concern for self

Fig. 1: Conflict handling styles derived from Dual-concern-Model
Consumer Complaint Behaviour(CCB), may arise due to some interpersonal conflicts
between the service provider and the consumer, or the intrapersonal conflicts in case when
the expectations of the customers are higher than the perceived quality of service delivery.
These conflicts can be handled by doing compromise, avoiding them, by being dominating,
obliged and integrated.
In the past few years, researches have shown that most of the consumer complaining
behaviour is for the service business as the service business is spreading very fast. There is
also seen the difference between the complaining behaviour of the Western people and Asian
people. The Western people are more of individualistic in nature and Asian people are
collectivistic in nature. In Asian countries, if the people have any service complains, then
they prefer to switch the brand rather to get indulge in the complaining process or spreading
negative word of mouth . In contrast to this the Western people dont prefer to switch the
brand they are with instead if they are facing any problem with the services they go through
the procedure to solve their complains and let the company know the areas they are lacking in
providing the services.

Literature Review:
Consumer complaining Behaviour
As mentioned above in the introduction, Consumer Complaining Behaviour is the result of
the dissatisfaction of the consumers from the product and services provided to them. They
sometimes show their dissatisfaction by taking the legal actions or sometimes they switch the
brand without saying anything.
According to Hirschman(1970), there are two types of active negative responses that arise
from the dissatisfaction.

Voicing
Exit behaviour of consumers

In voicing, the consumers verbally convey their complaints regarding the product and
services to the sellers of the organization by calling them or by going to the store and
complaining.
Whereas in case of Exit Behaviour, the consumers decides that they will going to end up of
all the transactions from the particular service provider. This shows that this group of
consumers dont have any kind of loyalty towards the brand.
Apart from these two kind of responses the consumers can also complain to the third party
involve like to the retailers or jobbers, who can convey their dissatisfaction to the company.
Consumers that do not complain to the marketers and change their priority are sometimes
called as the Passive Consumers.
Complaining against the service or product is most of the time is out of the dissatisfaction
caused by the failure of the product.

What is the Attitude of the person while complaining?