These Consumer Behaviour and Services Marketing Notes (BBA 3rd Semester) are designed to explain the subject in a clear and structured manner, with concepts connected to practical business situations. The notes help students understand how consumer decisions are formed and how organizations can design marketing strategies that respond to changing customer expectations. They also provide a foundation for understanding important areas such as consumer decision-making, market segmentation, customer satisfaction, service quality, service delivery, relationship marketing, and customer experience.
For BBA students, the subject is particularly useful because consumer understanding influences almost every marketing decision a business makes. Whether an organization is launching a new product, improving an existing service, building customer loyalty, or developing a marketing campaign, knowing what customers want and why they behave in a particular way can make a significant difference. These notes therefore provide both an academic foundation for examination preparation and a practical perspective on how businesses understand, attract, serve, and retain customers.
Download Consumer Behaviour & Services Marketing Notes – Unit Wise
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Course Units
Unit 1: Introduction to Consumer Behaviour
Topics Covered: Consumer behaviour covering its definition, importance and evolution, types of consumers, distinctions between consumer, customer, buyer and user, consumer decision-making process including need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post-purchase behaviour, cognitive dissonance, customer satisfaction, complaint behaviour, brand loyalty, repurchase intentions, word-of-mouth (WOM) and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).
Unit 2: Factors Influencing Consumer Behaviour
Topics Covered: Internal and psychological factors influencing consumer behaviour including motivation and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, McGuire’s psychological motives, consumer involvement, perception and perceptual organisation, selective exposure, attention, distortion and retention, Gestalt principles, consumer imagery and country-of-origin effects, learning theories including classical, operant and cognitive learning, personality theories, Big Five personality traits, brand personality, self-concept, consumer attitudes, ABC model, attitude formation and change, Fishbein multi-attribute model, and Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM).
Unit 3: External Influences on Consumer Behaviour
Topics Covered: Social and cultural influences on consumer behaviour covering culture, cultural values, norms, rituals, materialism and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, subcultures including regional, religious and linguistic groups, social class and its impact on consumption, reference groups and their informational, normative and comparative influences, celebrity and social media influencers, family buying roles and family life cycle, changing family structures, children’s influence on purchases, opinion leaders, market mavens, and electronic word-of-mouth influencers.
Unit 4: Introduction to Services Marketing
Topics Covered: Services marketing covering the definition and importance of services, characteristics of services through the IHIP framework—intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability, additional characteristics including ownership and customer participation, classification of services based on tangibility, market, customisation, labour intensity and customer contact, and the Services Marketing Triangle covering external, internal and interactive marketing and the roles of companies, employees and customers.
Unit 5: Services Marketing Mix and Service Quality
Topics Covered: Services marketing mix and service quality covering the extended 7 Ps—Product, Price, Place, People, Physical Evidence and Process, supplementary services and Lovelock’s Flower of Service, service pricing and distribution strategies, service employees and internal marketing, Service-Profit Chain, customer participation, servicescape and physical evidence, service blueprinting, service standardisation and customisation, service quality and the GAP Model, SERVQUAL and its five dimensions, SERVPERF, customer satisfaction measurement through CSAT, NPS and CES, service recovery and complaint management, poka-yoke, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), loyalty programmes and relationship marketing.
What is Consumer Behaviour and Services Marketing?
Every business ultimately depends on people—their needs, preferences, expectations, buying decisions, and experiences. Understanding why customers choose one product or brand over another is therefore an important part of marketing. At the same time, businesses operating in banking, education, healthcare, hospitality, retail, transport, and other service industries must understand how customers evaluate and experience services that cannot always be seen or physically examined before purchase. This makes Consumer Behaviour and Services Marketing an important subject for understanding modern markets and customer-oriented business strategies.
In BBA 3rd Semester, this subject takes students beyond the basic principles of marketing and focuses on the factors that influence consumer decisions and the special challenges involved in marketing services. Students explore the consumer decision-making process, psychological influences such as motivation, perception, learning, personality and attitudes, along with the effects of culture, social class, family, reference groups, and opinion leaders on purchasing behaviour.
These Consumer Behaviour and Services Marketing Notes cover important areas such as:
- Consumer Decision-Making Process: Understanding need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decisions, and post-purchase behaviour.
- Psychological Factors: Studying motivation, perception, learning, personality, self-concept, involvement, and consumer attitudes.
- Social and Cultural Influences: Exploring how culture, subcultures, social class, family, reference groups, celebrities, and social media influencers shape consumer choices.
- Consumer Behaviour in India: Understanding the influence of family orientation, regional and religious diversity, changing lifestyles, and social structures on consumption patterns.
- Introduction to Services Marketing: Learning the distinctive characteristics of services, including intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability, commonly represented through the IHIP framework.
- Services Marketing Mix: Understanding the extended 7 Ps—Product, Price, Place, People, Physical Evidence, Process, and Promotion/communication and how they are applied to service businesses.
- Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: Studying the GAP Model, SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, CSAT, NPS, and CES, along with complaint handling and service recovery.
- Customer Relationship Management: Learning how businesses build long-term relationships through loyalty programmes, relationship marketing, customer lifetime value, and different types of customer bonds.
The subject is particularly useful because it connects consumer psychology with practical marketing decisions. A business may have a strong product or service, but understanding what customers expect, how they perceive value, and what influences their final decision can determine whether that offering succeeds in the marketplace. For BBA students, these concepts provide a useful foundation for studying Marketing Management, Brand Management, Retail Management, Digital Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, and other business specialisations in later semesters.