What Business Students Need to Know About Buying Motives Skip to main content

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For marketing professionals, success is often predicated on a keen understanding of buyer inclinations and anxieties. With insight into ‘buying motives,’ top marketers tailor their pitches to customer needs, securing new business—and reassuring long-term clients.

While no two sales are the same, basic knowledge of buying motives can help marketing professionals adapt to all imaginable scenarios. Equally helpful for marketing campaigns and event coordination, and awareness of buyer psychology can propel marketing pros to leadership positions in their industries, forging a strong reputation among satisfied clients.

Are you curious about the buying motives that help business and marketing pros excel? Keep reading for important information.

Buyers Adopt Emotional and Rational Decision-Making Processes

Top marketers appreciate the complexity of buyer motives, which often combine emotional impulses and rational calculations. Common rational buyer motives include viability, profitability, durability, and convenience of products or services. These rational buyer motives are symptomatic of a larger focus on personal or company profit—evaluating new transactions as they affect company margins. In addition to financial concerns, rational buyer motives can also prioritize factors like time and health and safety.

Compounding—or overpowering—these rational decisions, buyers are also given to more emotional motives, from personal comfort to altruistic priorities. While selling to both business and individual consumers, marketers will note that buyers often compare themselves to others. This can produce a drive to uniqueness—purchasing something no one else has—or to integration, as buyers try to fit in with the latest trends. Identifying these traits can help marketing pros secure business more effectively—a crucial edge after the Marketing and Events Coordinator program.

Affection and family ties can also be powerful buyer motives

Affection and family ties can also be powerful buyer motives

Buyer Motives Vary with Demographics

Top marketers also note changes in buyer motives across demographics, varying their sales strategies and messaging accordingly. With more marketing occurring through social media, millennials have developed a distinct buyer identity from previous generations. For instance, millennial consumers are increasingly known for prioritizing charitable causes, with up to 50 percent saying they would buy products associated with social good.

Moreover, up to 37 percent of millennials reportedly distrust big companies—a figure that can also weigh on marketing campaigns. Students at the business school are advised to track demographic factors, assessing how gender, culture and—above all—generational attitudes affect business. Among consumer groups, companies and individual customers, demographic tendencies help marketers identify and capitalize on likely buyer motives.

Buying Motives Help Marketers Maximize Business School Training

After Marketing and Events Coordinator training, students can use buyer motives to pursue a preferred career stream, catering to buyers in a field of their choosing. Insights into buyer psychology can enhance professional initiative and advancement, as marketing pros develop specialized proficiencies with a given consumer base. In turn, this specialization can enhance professional satisfaction—and the freedom of pursuing one’s career interests.

In addition to career flexibility, buyer motive expertise also improves the performance of one’s everyday duties. Recent business graduates can leverage buyer insight into leadership roles within their organization, improving targeted advertising campaigns, promotional messaging and even public relations.

Do you think you would excel in a marketing career?