UNDERSTANDING consumer purchasing behavior allows a company to easily provide for consumers’ needs and easily promote the company’s products and services. Understanding consumer behavior leads to marketing success. Consumer behavior is constantly changing, and companies should identify consumer trends before their competitors do in order to strengthen the organization’s sales.

After consumers acquire money through hard work, inheritance or luck, they have two options: spend their money or save/invest it.

Marketers should understand the process that consumers follow to purchase their goods and services in order to successfully use all elements of the marketing mix. Companies focus on consumers because consumer demand, or spending, is approximately two-thirds of the gross national product.

Here, JWT Manila brings you a refreshed look at how brands, products and categories in the Philippines can look into consumer interactions and take advantage of these locally across higher-income, middle-income down to lower-income PHL consumers.

JWT Manila planning director Pam Garcia, who did the local analysis, reports in a nutshell:

People adopted a classic and ever-present spending mode as the omnipresent normal. With rising prices of daily needs like gasoline, transportation and food, they just cannot afford to relax their daily careful spending and will still welcome even more affordable prices and other value signals like multiple benefits at an affordable cost, controlled dosage as well as just-the-right benefits at a lower cash outlay.

The challenge for brands under this trend is how they can further imagine, excite and elevate value not just in product size or dose but also the benefits for their consumers in 2012.

Middle- and lower-income consumers have their own little indulgences to make up for the feelings of restriction in the past few months. To de-stress, women and moms find thrills with an in-home beauty treatment. For dads or older male children, a less than five-peso dose of cigarettes or gin. Other children or family members who are controlled from sweets during weekdays get a respite during weekends, for example, with a serving of ice cream or a slice of cake. Others opt for wireless, and small gadgets that they acquire through bank financing or small loan from relatives.

Categories and products this 2012 is to position their offerings in the context of consumers’ austerity and recession fatigue as a much-needed, very welcome satisfying break or escape.

Though it is not a sense of discontent nor an increase in job difficulty that has spurred an entrepreneurial spirit, but rather a sense of experimentation with products and services and a classic need to supplement income. It is also not as easy to put up a business in the Philippines, according to our local entrepreneurship experts.

For brands this 2012, there seems to be exciting opportunities in the activation and communication of consumers’ entrepreneurial spirit and go-getter attitude.

Consumers will still give utmost importance to the price value equation of products (great quality, great price) ahead of shared value. Once this price evaluation is met, the shared value component does give additional value in terms of a sense of satisfaction at having been able to help in your own small way, at least for some middle-income consumers.

An opportunity for brand stewards this 2012 is how they can look into shared value aspects of their brand as a way to overall brand value.

One interesting trend to re-imagine for our brands, especially food brands this 2012, is if we can introduce a variant or feature of our product that caters specifically to earth-friendly and even health-friendly food connoisseurs.

There is a growing acceptance of happily single mothers or single-by-choice professional women in their workplaces. Another proof is that it is an emerging character in their well-known soap operas. In brand ads and communication, though, possibly due to religious and family culture sensitivities, the single mother is less featured.

One question we can ask for our brands this 2012 is to see if there is an opportunity to talk to this under-the-radar demographic of single-by-choice 35- to 45-year-old women, as well as take a more careful look at the female side of our typical 18- to 34-year-old target segment.

The desire for surprise, randomness, discovery and inspiration, “life is like a box of chocolates you’ll never know what you’re gonna get” feeling among developed-world consumers was surprising, not felt and at first not even understood fully by local consumers. More of the digital world has opened them up to more discovery and inspiration than ever before.

Exciting opportunities about brands in 2012 excite randomness and delightful surprises whether this will be through new off-line or online interactions.

There are more trends actually that JWT Manila has disclosed, but to sum it all, this columnist thinks that the first step occurs when a consumer recognizes the presence of a need or want. The recognition step can be influenced by marketing efforts when companies understand consumer needs (“I am thirsty”) and then promote products (“Drink our soft drink”) that meet those needs. Researchers have determined that there are several needs and wants that motivate human behavior. Those needs range from basic biological necessities to a desire for human happiness.

Bubuwit Squeaks

Top Gun

There is a certain toughness to the way this prominent communications persona treats her supplier that is almost masculine, almost butch. She maintains a tight ship as she controls her marketing and public-affairs team. She roars like a lion. What will break her ice-maiden cool? No one will steal the limelight from her. Who will dare fly with her?