Topic 3 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Topic 3 - Essay Example Consumer behavior is what the whole marketing theory and concepts are based on. By studying consumer behavior, marketers hope to find the reason why the consumer wants to buy a certain product. It aims to help and identify how people make their buying decisions and also the factors that influence those decisions. There are usually two kinds of buyers, organizational buyers and consumers. We are only concerned with the consumers who are the ones who buy services and products for use by themselves. They buy things that serve their need for living and the basic requirements of life. They also buy products to make the world know about their personalities and reveal their attitudes and their roles in the society. In other words they not only cater to the physiological needs but also the psychological aspect as well. Individuality is a characteristic that a man develops due to the nature and the surrounding environment he spends that life in. the behavior of a person towards buying a certain product will therefore be different for everybody. They might have different tastes, likes and dislikes, attitudes and values and their decision making process will differ according to that. The three major things that influence the consumer's social environment are individual circumstances, personal psychology and the social environment. All these above mentioned factors have a lasting impact on the individuals buying behavior. Factors Social environment in which an individual lives his or her life helps greatly in shaping the life of people and their preferences. The culture that they are prevailing in, the reference groups to which they belong and cater too and the social class they exist in or the one in which they want to exist in. There can be an informational influence over them for example when they are told about the authenticity of a certain product's working. A customer can also be influenced by the type of reference groups that he or she relates too. A marketer needs to identify the needs and influences of the reference groups of his target market in order to understand their consumer behavior and plan out their offer in such a way that coincides with the needs and wants of the customer and caters to his or her influence. A customer can be influenced by the 'family of orientation' which is the basic family or the parental family that a customer has; a daughter might end up using the same washing detergen t her mother uses. Another kind of reference group is the family of procreation that is more of the extended family; a customer's buying decision might be influenced with the house of his or her in-laws and he or she might to carry out different tasks and buy certain kinds of products in the presence of their extended family. Secondary groups are the less formal groups which the customer doesn't end up meeting everyday and therefore they don't pose a lot of influence over the buying decision behavior of the customer. Individual characteristics tend to stem from demographics characteristics. The gender of the person, the age group with which he or she is belonging to, the stage of the lifecycle the customer is catering to and the customer's

Ranking method Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Ranking method - Research Paper Example The users don’t have to scan through every webpage to find the relevant ones or those with relevant tweets or news. Many ranking functions have been developed for the purpose of evaluating the websites and the web contents. Each of these functions is based on a different algorithm which uses a certain criteria to evaluate the relevance of web content and the data. This paper will consider three separate papers that make an illustration of the use different criteria to apply the ranking algorithm to solve ranking problems based on different aspects. We will seek to find out the themes that are common in these papers, the non-overlapping concepts and any disagreements. We will also determine the various ranking algorithms and their use by researchers to improve ranking. The various aspects of the ranking algorithms will also be looked at to determine their importance to internet users. In the world today, there is an exponential increase in the demand for information which has been highly facilitated by the advancement of informational technology. This has resulted in the development of billions of online items and websites that try to satisfy the users’ needs. Most of these items and websites do not serve the interest of the users fully. Therefore there is the need to optimize these items by ranking them according to their usefulness and also gather information on the usefulness of various websites to users [2]. In this paper, we analyze three research papers which mainly revolve around improving the user experience in the online industry. The articles are Dupret etal [1], Feng etal [2] and Kumar etal [3]. Each one of them compliments the other in that they all propose how to optimize ranking of items in a website and how to evaluate the success by deriving the user engagement using a proposed metric. A summary of how to optimize the informational items found online will be provided which largely try to address the problems