Advertising: A Fusion Process between Consumer and Product

The study of consumer behavior explains how individuals make decision to spend the resources (time, money etc) available to them for purchasing an item for consumption. Many questions arise in the mind of the consumers before buying a product. It may be personal or product related. During the decision making process the consumer passes through five stages. The stages are (Need recognition. Information search. Evaluation of Alternatives. Purchase decision. Post purchase Evaluation). Consumers search for information before buying any product or service. According to the decision making process consumers evaluate the alternatives available to him before purchasing the product. Advertising plays an important role during the phase of information search. A company in the market always looks for the prospective client to sell their goods or service they are offering in the market. Advertising serves the company as a medium of communication. The marketers can penetrate the untapped market. The number of prospects increases so as the revenue collection for the company. This empirical research paper tries to find out the effect of advertisement in the decision making process among the consumers. The objectives of the study are 1. Advertising influences the consumer decision making process. 2. Kind of product that consumers purchase on the basis of advertising information. 3. Previous knowledge about the product is more important than advertising or not. 4. Factors other than advertising influences the decision making process. Research is been dependent on primary data. Data has been collected from Kolkata metropolitan only. A closed questionnaire has been developed to collect the primary data. Data was collected from college students and office employees by the process of snowball sampling. By their reference data was collected from their colleagues and relatives also. Numbers of respondents were 180. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.