Page 192 - Foundations of Marketing

Consumer Buying Behavior | Chapter 6 159

E ntrepreneurship in Marketing

Birchbox Helps Eliminate Guesswork from Beauty Products

Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna know how difficult Birchbox’s online magazine, Facebook page, and YouTube
it is to sort through the blizzard of beauty items on store channel. Not knowing exactly what will arrive adds to
shelves and find just the right cosmetics without invest- customers’ anticipation, and the low cost reduces the
ing a lot of time and money. As classmates at Harvard risk of trying something new. Just as important, custom-
Business School, they founded Birchbox to deliver a box of ers have the opportunity to experience each product’s
sample-size beauty products by mail to customers every benefits firsthand and then decide whether to purchase it
month for one low monthly fee. Once subscribers tried the in the future, a process that Birchbox’s founders call “try,
samples and saw the results, they could buy full-size prod- learn, and buy.”
ucts from the Birchbox website whenever they ran out. Barely two years after launching Birchbox,
When a customer starts a subscription, she com- Beauchamp and Barna had attracted 100,000 subscrib-
pletes a profile questionnaire to guide Birchbox in ers. More recently, they’ve expanded into Europe and
selecting cosmetics, shampoos, moisturizers, and other are testing sample boxes for men. Customers like the
products that fit her preferences. Each monthly ship- convenience of receiving samples by mail, and many
ment contains a variety of samples chosen for individual brands that have distributed samples via Birchbox are
d
subscribers, with additional product tips available from happy with the sales results, too.

© iStockphoto.com/CRTd

Lifestyles

As we saw in Chapter 4 , many marketers attempt to segment markets by lifestyle. A lifestyle
is an individual’s pattern of living expressed through activities, interests, and opinions.
Lifestyle patterns include the ways people spend time, the extent of their interaction with
others, and their general outlook on life. People partially determine their own lifestyles, but
lifestyle is also affected by personality and by demographic factors such as age, education,
income, and social class. Lifestyles have a strong impact on many aspects of the consumer
buying decision process, from problem recognition to postpurchase evaluation. Lifestyles
influence consumers’ product needs and brand preferences, types of media they use, and how
and where they shop. A number of companies, such as CopperBridge Media, offer lifestyle
6
analysis to business organizations.

SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE BUYING LO 5 . Examine the social
influences that may affect the
DECISION PROCESS consumer buying decision
process.
Forces that other people exert on buying behavior are called social influences . As
lifestyle An individual’s pattern
Figure 6.1 (located at the beginning of this chapter) shows, they are divided into five of living expressed through
major groups: roles, family, reference groups and opinion leaders, social classes, and activities, interests, and opinions
culture and subcultures.
social influences The forces
other people exert on one’s
Roles buying behavior
roles Actions and activities that
All of us occupy positions within groups, organizations, and institutions. In these positions a person in a particular position
we play one or more roles , which are sets of actions and activities a person in a particular is supposed to perform based
position is supposed to perform based on the expectations of both the individual and sur- on expectations of the individual
rounding persons. Because every person occupies numerous positions, they have many roles. and surrounding persons

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