The starting point to understand buyer behaviour is the stimulus-response model. Marketing and environmental stimuli enter the buyer’s consciousness. The buyer’s characteristics and decision process lead to certain purchase decisions. The marketer’s task is to understand what happens in the buyer’s consciousness between the arrival of outside stimuli and the buyer’s purchase decision.

A consumer’s buying behaviour is influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors. Cultural factors exert the broadest and deepest influence. Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behaviours. Each culture consists of smaller subcultures that provide more specific identification and socialization for their members. Subcultures include nationality religion, racial groups, and geographic region.

Multicultural marketing grew out of careful marketing research revealing how different ethnic and demographic niches did not always respond favourably to mass-market advertising. Virtually all human societies exhibit social stratification. This stratification sometimes takes the form of caste system where members of different castes are reared for specific roles and they cannot change their caste membership.

More frequently the stratification takes the form of social classes, relatively homogeneous and enduring divisions in society that are hierarchically ordered and whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviour.

Social classes have several characteristics:

(a) Those within a class tend to behave more alike than persons from two different social classes.

(b) Persons are perceived as occupying an inferior or superior position