Marketing Research Proposal Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Marketing - Research Proposal Example The credit crunch currently being experienced provides an opportunity for an understanding of its influence on buyer behaviour. This learning will allow marketing to work out strategies to operate efficiently in markets, where there is a paucity of credit. Such strategies could include giving tangible value to brands and pricing and promotion strategies in a market where there is a paucity of credit. Lenard, 2008 suggests that during paucity of credit, consumers tend to equate price and brand. In other words in the credit crunch have made consumers hypersensitive to price and this provides an opportunity to develop a pricing strategy that capitalizes on this hypersensitivity of consumers to price. Less of brand promotion and more of competitive pricing may be the requirement in such a marketing strategy (Lenard, 2008). Why has price become such a dominant factor in consumer behaviour? Even prior to the credit crunch wages as a share of national income has been showing a downward trend over the last three decades raising the level of the influence of price on purchase decisions. The credit crunch has heightened this influence of price on purchase decision (Harman, 2008). High value capital goods are among the first places to feel the impact of credit crunch. This can be seen in the changed behaviour in car purchases in the United Kingdom, fuelled by the higher prices of petrol and the credit crunch. In the United Kingdom new car registrations fell by 21.8% in September 2008 (Committee on Climate Change, 2008). Consumer behaviour reaction has not just impacted high value capital goods, but almost every product and service. For almost fifty years consumers were given a surplus of credit that enabled them to purchase with the minimal influence of price. The credit crunch changed all that in that it sparked recession in the UK in the final quarter of 2008, which led to an increase in