I have been working in the fitness industry for 3-4 years. Being in the industry for so long, I started to observe and learn consumers purchasing behaviors. Maybe the customer needs to lose weight, or they want the convenience of a 1-hour class. By studying a customer’s different needs and desires, as marketers, we should try to influence the consumers’ attitudes to affect their behaviors and make their purchasing decision easier.
First, need/desire recognition can happen in two ways, with an external stimulus or internal stimulus. External stimulus can come upon you by seeing an advertisement of a gym, and you might pass by a gym, you might go to store and see workout clothes and think to yourself that you need to get back into the gym, or your friends can even tell you about a new gym they are going to. Internal stimulus can be bought upon your conscience; for example, you have started to feel like you have gained some weight or that you want to be more physically active.
Second, the need/desire formulation is deciding what gym is right for you. You do an informative search during this process. You might ask your friends what gym they go too, or go online and research different gyms. You might want to try out all different gyms, or you might want a gym that is more class-based, or one that’s more cardio training. By attribute or feature processing, you start to consider all the features a product or service has. For example, if you are looking for a gym that opens at 5 am. That’s probably the essential feature for you. In the brand or modeling process, you look at one gym. Let’s say you go to a one week trial. You have time to gather all the characteristics of this gym to help you make your final decision about it.
Lastly, it is making a purchase or exchange is called the need/desire fulfillment. First, you make the purchase in the fitness industry, and it’s purchasing a gym membership. After the purchase, a person usually makes post- exchange evaluation, which means at the moment you might think you got the perfect gym membership that’s right for you, but after using it for a couple of months, you probably start to change your mind as you might want to try something different or that you just haven’t seen change in your body, which this process is called post-consumption/ usage evaluation.
As marketers, we should learn and know our customers and potential customers’ feelings and behaviors through their needs and desires and the fulfillment of them. It is essential marketers develop a relationship with the target consumers to be able to influence their actions effectively.