Patterns of Buyer Behaviour

The patterns of consumer behaviour using the Dirichlet Model:

This marketing model is about habitual near steady state consumer behaviour. It is not dynamic. In dynamic situations, it does provide a benchmark.

Purchasing of Individual Brands

• Brands have very different no. of buyers, in line with their market shares
• Average Purchase Frequencies are much similar among brands
• Double Jeopardy (DJ) effect – Smaller brands not only have fewer buyers but those who buy them also buy less often.
• Average amount bought per purchase occasion varies little from brand to brand
• Most buyers of a brand buy it very infrequently
• Most consumers of a specific brand buy it only once a year or so

Purchasing competitive Brands

• Most consumers tend to buy more than one brand over a period of time
• Few consumers of a brand are 100% loyal to that one brand over a long series of time period (even less 100% loyalty for smaller brands – DJ effect again)
• 100% buyers usually do not buy the brand heavily
• A brand’s customer buy other brands in total far more often in a period like a year than they buy the brand itself
• Which other brands and brand’s customers also buy is mostly much the same from brand to brand
• The dominant factor for the purchase duplications between brands is the penetration of each brand, in a near constant proportion (Duplication of Purchase Law)
• Most markets are largely unsegmented for more or less substitutable brands
• Brand shares are much the same for the lighter and heavier category buyers

Each individual consumer habitually buys from a small repertoire of brands, with steady long run propensities or probabilities of buying.

Extracted from Patterns of Buyer Behaviour: Regularities, Models and Extensions (1995) by Uncles, M, Ehrenberg, A & Hammond, K