Consumer behavior: Fast Food Companies using Social Networking sites to target children - Marketing Assessment Answers

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Learning objectives:

• explain why marketers require a thorough understanding of consumer behaviour and its major influences
• understand the major group factors that influence consumer behaviour
• analyse the major individual factors that influence consumer behaviour
• explain the general steps in the consumer decision-making process.

The present article is about fast food companies that are using social networking sites to target children. This is a major part of consumer behaviour. Consumer behaviour is a concept that helps companies in understanding the behaviour of consumers and then makes decisions on the basis of the behaviour of customers (Cutler, 2010). Children are also major consumers of various articles such as fast food, cold drinks, chocolates, etc. Companies that are dealing in these articles need to understand the behaviour of children so that they become potential customers of the brand.

The Australian voluntary advertising codes in the marketing of fast food for children are not effective and this is why companies can easily target children using social media marketing (Thaichon, 2016). There are various aspects of consumer behaviour that are social, cultural, age, family, habit, income, learning, motivation , perception, etc. (Hanssens, 2013). These factors affect the behaviour of consumers towards buying a product. Those companies that control these factors as per the customers get succeeded in marketing. Here, in this example fast food companies know that children are more prone to using social networking sites and this is why using this as a mode of marketing will increase their market share. They are right in anticipating this and this is the reason why the market share of fast food companies is increasing gradually. In this piece of article they found that social networking sites are using strategies such as toys and giveaway vouchers to engage children. For an instance children are encouraged to sign up and like company’s page in exchange for discounts. This is how children are of the opinion that free toys with meals allure them to see the advertisement of the companies. This is how consumer behaviour helps the companies in achieving their objectives (Maklan, 2014).