Analyzing The Consumer Decision-Making Process In Choosing Holmes University As Institution Of Study In An Essay.

For this assignment you need to undertake research with current Holmes students and analyse their decision processes in choosing Holmes as an institution of study in Australia

• Describe the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the sample students 

• Analyse the consumer decision processes involved with choosing Holmes over other providers. (How did they arrive at the decision to study at Holmes and factors that have impacted on their choice?) 

• Analyse how student motivation, personality and emotion affect their purchasing decision?

• Based on your findings, what recommendations can you make to education providers in their effort to recruit international students?  

Background of the Holmes University

The following assignment is about defining the consumer buying processes or determining the consumer buyer behaviors. In this assignment, there are two parts. The organization that has been selected for this assignment is the Holmes University that is situated in Australia. It is one of the most renowned business colleges in the world. The university began its journey in the year 1963 when they opened their business commercial college in Melbourne. The topic of this assignment is to find the different demographic and psychographic characteristics of the students who read in this university. In the first part, the different consumer decision processes have to be analyzed. Consumer decision process is a very important and critical process that has a direct connection with the business implementations.

In this part, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the students have to be discussed. With regard to this, 30 students from this university studying in different departments have to be chosen so that it would be helpful to have a better understanding of the entire scenario.

The demographic characteristics of the students have to be discussed here of the sample students. A number of 30 students have been selected who belong to the different sections of the country (Mazanov et al., 2013).

Out of these 40 students, 10 of them belong to the age group of 20-25. Other 10 students belong to the age group of 25-30, and the rest of the 10 students belong to the age group of 30-35 years.

Among these 30 students, 13 of them are female and the rest 17 are males. So, it means that around 43% of the students are female students and around 57% students are male students.

The selected students belong to different ethnicities. Out of those 30 students, 5 students belong to the native Australians. Then, 6 of the students belong to the Chinese Australians ethnic group. Next up, 4 students belong to Lebanese Australians group. 10 students belong to the European Australian groups. The rest of the 5 students belong to the Irish Australian groups.

The chosen 30 students belong to different educational backgrounds. 10 of them have done their high schooling in Melbourne, 5 of them have done it in Adelaide, 3 of them have completed school education in Brisbane 6 of them have done it in Tasmania and rest of the 6 have done it in Sydney. All of them have got good marks in their respective subjects over 80%.

Consumer Decision-Making Process of Holmes University Students

According to the growth rate of Australia, the students have come from good families. 8 students have come from established working class families. Other 4 students have come from established middle class families, 5 have come from mobile middle class families, 6 have come from emerging affluent class and the rest 7 have come from established affluent class families. The family income of these students is according to their economic classes.

Religious Beliefs

The 30 students chosen for this assignment are of different religions. The 6 Chinese Australians belong to Buddhist groups. The 4 Lebanese Australians follow the Islam and the 10 European Australians are Catholic Christians. The 5 native Australians and 5 Irish Australians belong to the Christian religion.

After doing a thorough psychographic research on the 30 students, it has been found that 10 of them like to hear the soft rock music and songs. 5 of them like to hear pop and 8 of them like to hear old classic English songs. The rest of the 7 students like to hear hard metal rock music.

It has been seen that the students who belong to the emerging affluent class and established affluent class families are very much fond of passing a lavish lifestyle. All 13 of them like to enjoy life with luxurious spending. Other students like to enjoy life by fulfilling their necessary needs and this is their only intention to live. They are not lavish and have come to the college for learning purpose and get a good job after that.

Consumer decision process making is a very complicated process (Mihart, 2012). This process involves many stages in succession. The stages include from recognition of the problem regarding the matter to activities that occur after buying that product. This process is considered to be a very complex product because the entire process depends on the decision of the customer about that particular product. In order to buy the particular product, the buyer has to know about the product, then evaluate the product depending on the marketing standards, compare the product with other variables available in the market, select the best available product in the market and then decide to purchase it (Mihart, 2012). So, the most complicated part of the entire process is to understand the quality of the product and then realizing the different aspects like the price of the product, quality and longevity of the product.

Demographic and Psychographic Characteristics of the Students

In the aspect of this particular assignment, the aspect of Holmes University has to be focused. Holmes University has been a constant option for the students who have desired to learn about the business management within the country or even outside. Holmes University has been running successfully for a long time within the country and it has produced many successful business managers across the globe ("Holmes Institute", 2017). They provide different educational facilities like the Vocational Education and Training, Higher Education and Secondary education ("Holmes Institute", 2017). They provide quality coaching in these sectors and they have focused on both the domestic students and students from abroad. They have created a very dedicated kind of learning environment where the teachers give their best efforts to teach the children and the students are focused at the centre of this learning process. The teachers are very much supportive and caring towards their students. They have 6 school locations in different parts of the country. They have 6 locations for their university out of which 5 are in Australia and 1 is in Asia. The only location situated in Asia is in Hong Kong. Other branches are in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast in Queensland and Cairns. These locations are beautiful as well as comfortable for the students ("Holmes Institute", 2017). 

They have a wide range of courses to offer to their students. They offer higher education courses like Bachelor degrees in business, professional accounting, fashion business, Information Systems, Diploma in business, MBA, MPA and others. They offer diploma courses in Leadership and Management, Accounting, Hospitality, Commercial Cookery and others. This wide range of courses helps the students to select Holmes University as their first choice preference for pursuing their particular studies ("Holmes Institute", 2017).

Students select this university among others as their purchasing decision supports so. This purchasing decision depends upon many things like the personality, motivation and emotion of the students.  Motivation is a very strong working force in determining the consumer behavior of the students (Oyserman, 2015). The lifestyle, social class and social class are the external factors on which the consumer buying decisions depend on. The organization has to motivate the buyer according to the class so that the buyer can expect something from the organizations. Holmes University has increased the motivation among the students to study in their institution by offering the wide range of products to them.

Personality is a very subtle parameter in the marketing aspect that determines the buyer’s internal likes for a brand product (Erdo?mu? & Büdeyri-Turan 2012).  This signifies the psychological characteristics of a person on how he reacts in the given marketing environments. It depicts the individual likes for certain product variants. These personality traits can change with many events like death, birth or marriage. The marketers can decide his strategies in trying to increase his marketing areas. Holmes University has understood the personal likes and desirtes of the domestic and international students so they have come out successfully.

Guidelines on Recruiting International Students

Emotion plays an important role in consumer behavior (Hwang & Kandampully, 2012). It shows the desires of human beings on what type of organization they want to invest on. Negative emotions like anger, anxiety, sadness, depression sheds a negative impact on the minds of the consumer. The students have heard about the Holmes University by researching on the internet and other sources and they have been convinced and satisfied for being admitted into this university as all the necessary desires will be fulfilled.

In this part of the assignment, some guidelines have to be provided on how the Holmes University could manage on recruiting more international students in their university. They have a good number of domestic students but to increase the nature of their working areas and being successful on the global arena, they need to adopt some positive strategies that would attract international students (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). More number of international students in their database will also increase their global reputation and keep them ahead of their rival universities.

Social media should be use to attract the international students by eye catching advertisements on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms (Tuten & Solomon, 2014).

The cultural and the educational factors should be assessed properly and a mixture of cultures maintaining harmony should be presented. This would be effective in marketing process.

The global prospect lists should be acquired by the university and they should be addressed to the proper university.

The current international students should be used as the brand ambassadors who will attract the other international students to this university (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014).

The university should use inspirational messages for the international students so that they get convinced to join them.

The Australian government should also co-operate for the global outreach of the university (Barber et al., 2013).  

In this part of the assignment, a literature review has to be conducted on the topic of consumer behavior (Solomon, 2014).

Consumer behavior is a complex concept in the field of marketing and a huge part is dependent upon it for a successful marketing strategy (Baker, 2014). It is very obvious that the habits of the customers and the previous experiences of the customers about the product have a deep impact on the consumer behavior. The image of the particular product creates a big impact on the purchasing decisions of the customers. The better and attractive the product is, the more the customers will be drawn towards the product to buy it. The organizations should always look to improve the image of the brand product so that the customers will be loyal towards the product and the organization (Romaniuk & Nenycz-Thiel, 2013).

Marketing Strategies for Recruiting International Students

One of the most important aspects of the consumer behavior is the Five stages model that has been developed to understand the term better and analyze the different stages through proper evaluation (Oliver, 2014).  The consumer behavior or the purchasing decision of the customers depend upon the five stages and these five stages are a) recognizing the problem or need, b) a thorough information research about solving the problem, c) evaluating the alternative products, d) purchasing the product and finally e) evaluating the effectiveness of the product after purchasing it. There are some factors that affect this concept of consumer behavior in a large way. These factors are situational, cultural, social and personal (Bian & Forsythe, 2012).

The situational factors that affect the consumer behavior are location, environment, timing and the weather conditions (Gunter & Furnham, 2014). The marketers try to motivate customers by presenting fine environment and situational factors so that the customers will be attracted to go there and make positive purchase decisions in favor of them.

Cultural factors include the cross-cultural differences among the consumers and the marketers (Bian & Forsythe, 2012). These differences can be both on local and global regions.

The social factors include the interactions made between perspective or potential customers and the others at several circumstances. The targeting members of the society are seen as the opinion makers and this helps to create effective strategies to convince the customers (Moshrefjavadi et al., 2012). 

Personal factors include the taste preferences of the customers, the financial situations and other things (Hoyer & Stokburger-Sauer, 2012).  The personal factors are seen to be more effective in case of the target segmentations of the products, market positioning and the 4 P’s of marketing (Singh, 2012).

 Some theories or models of consumer behavior have to be described in this segment (Kardes, Cronley & Cline, 2014).

 In this theory, the focus is on the analysis of the already existing attitudes in decision making process (Montano & Kasprzyk, 2015). The consumers are seen as mere rational actors who act on being driven by their personal choices. Marketers should have a specific approach because the consumer takes specific buying actions in expectation out of a specific outcome.

EKB model was developed by Engel, Kollet and Blackwell. According to this model, the consumers make a purchasing decision after a long-term thought and applying rational insight into the matter (Solomon, Russell-Bennett & Previte, 2012).  The marketers try to influence the consumers by variety of products and external influences. The marketers should provide sufficient information about the product to the consumers so that the consumers should take those products should be kept under consideration.

Some other theories like the Theory of Planned behavior, Black box model are also applicable in the context of consumer buying behavior (Montano & Kasprzyk, 2015).

These theories can be linked with the present topic of discussion, the Holmes University in Australia. Especially, the theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behavior has a direct relation with attracting the students to study in their university. The students would feel attracted towards the university because of the wide range of courses and facilities are offered by the university. The students would consider these factors with reason and they would decide to get admitted in this institute and also recommend their known ones to join there as well.

Conclusion

After a thorough discussion on the entire topic on Holmes University, it can be concluded that the university has provided the students with many courses that could be useful to the students. The students will be very happy to join there. A thorough analysis on the sample students has been done so that the cross-cultural affairs that are managed by the university authority can be assessed. The demographic and psychographic characteristics of the students have been very helpful. The various models and theories have also helped to get a deeper insight into the topic. Various aspects have been highlighted through the literature review and the strategies to draw more international students have been discussed as well.

References

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