Factors Influencing Organizational Buying Behavior

Organizational buying behavior is influenced by several factors that a marketer should analyze carefully. The major factors influencing organizational buying behavior are explained as follows.

1. Environmental factors
2. Organizational factors
3. Interpersonal factors
4. Individual factors

Environmental factors: Environmental factors include government regulation, change in demand pattern, technological innovations, competition, cost of funds, availability of reliable suppliers, availability of resources, etc. The marketing organizations must be able to access the strengths and weaknesses of these factors and analyze how these factors affect their customer. Then the concerned organization should predict as to how buyers will adjust their purchase. If necessary, they must be ready to change their marketing strategy to keep up with the buyer’s changed behavior.

Organizational factors: Every organization have a certain goal and objective, accepted producing for purchasing and an organizational structure, all of which influences its purchasing decision. These organizational characteristics provide clues for determining how one industrial buyer might be different from another and how purchase decisions are likely to be made. The goal and objective of an organization influence the type of product it needs and criteria by which it evaluates. Different organization may have different goal and objective.

Interpersonal factors: Within the organization also the primary users include the individual personnel or staff with different motives, interests and authority. They may interact with each other. For example, a purchasing manager and a product user within the organization may have quite different opinions relative to how important price is about product quality and specific product feature. The purchasing manager may be concerned more with price saving, while the product users may be concerned more with quality and design.

Individual factors: In any organization the individual staff makes buying decision and purchase products. Therefore, the organizational buying may be affected by their personal motivations, perceptions, preferences and background. These individual characteristics are influenced by the individual participant’s demographic and psychological factors. A supplier’s challenge it to learn about the characteristics of individual participant so that selling appeals can be tailored to the individual nature of the actual buyers.