title: Bill Parcells

text: After a two-year hiatus, Parcells returned to the NFL in 1993 as the head coach for the struggling New England Patriots, who were fresh off of a 2–14 record. Within two years, he coached the team to a 10–6 record and its first playoff game in eight years. In 1996, he guided the Patriots to their first division title in 11 years, and only the second and third home playoff games in franchise history. The Patriots went all the way to Super Bowl XXXI, but lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35–21, in New Orleans.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Parcells left the Patriots after disagreements with owner Robert Kraft, who had bought the team in early 1994, after Parcells' first year as head coach. Parcells had effectively been the team's general manager since arriving in New England, but felt Kraft would not allow him enough input in player personnel decisions. Upon his departure, Parcells famously stated: "They want you to cook the dinner; at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries. Okay?" This was mainly in reference to an incident in the Patriots' war room during the 1996 Draft. Parcells wanted to draft defensive end Tony Brackens with their first-round choice, but was vetoed by Kraft. They ultimately selected Ohio State wide receiver Terry Glenn.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Although Parcells had decided to leave New England, his contract did not allow him to coach anywhere else. The New York Jets sought Parcells as head coach and general manager after a 4–28 record under Rich Kotite. To circumvent Parcells' contractual obligations, the Jets hired Bill Belichick (then the No. 1 assistant to Parcells) as the Jets coach, and then hired Parcells in an "advisory" role. New England threatened legal action against Parcells and the Jets, but NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue brokered a deal between the two sides, with New England releasing Parcells from his contract and the Jets giving New England a third- and fourth-round pick that year, a second-round pick the next year and a first-round draft choice the year after that. Jets owner Leon Hess gave Parcells complete control over football operations, the main sticking point in his dispute with Kraft.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Parcells again orchestrated a remarkable turnaround in his first year with the Jets. In his first season with the Jets, the team barely missed the playoffs with a record of 9–7 (the Jets were 1–15 the year before Parcells arrived, and had won a total of 10 games in the previous three seasons combined). In 1998, the Jets went to the playoffs with a current franchise-best 12–4 record, which was good enough for second place in the conference and earned the Jets their third home playoff game since moving to New Jersey in 1984 (their first home playoff game was against the New England Patriots following the 1985 season), but they lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos in the .


title: Bill Parcells

text: In 1999, expectations were high for the Jets to go to the Super Bowl. However, quarterback Vinny Testaverde ruptured his Achilles tendon in the Jets home opener and the season went downhill from there. After starting the season 1–6, the Jets won three straight and faced the Indianapolis Colts. Parcells emphasized the importance of not obtaining a "7th loss" but they did lose to the Colts and then to the New York Giants the following week. At 4–8, the Jets were in danger of finishing below .500. The Jets would finish 8–8, but out of the playoffs. In 1999, Parcells retired from football for the second time, vowing that he would not coach again. He remained with the Jets one more year as general manager. To date, he is the only Jets coach to leave the team with a winning record after coaching at least two seasons.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Following three straight 5–11 seasons, Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones lured Parcells out of retirement and made him the head coach in 2003.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Always known for deploying psychological tactics and strategies to get the most from his players, Parcells mandated upon his arrival in 2003 that to have the Cowboy star placed on the helmet was a privilege reserved for players that had made the team, not a right, and informed all rookies that regardless of their draft position, it was incumbent upon them to "earn the star." Jones enthusiastically embraced the idea, and supported Parcells' decision to have Cowboy equipment managers remove all of the star logos from rookie helmets. Since then, all drafted and UFA (undrafted free agent) rookies that report to the Cowboys must officially make the roster before having the star logo permanently placed on their helmet.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The practice of "earning the star" has become a permanent fixture of Cowboy tradition, with all of Parcells' successors adopting the practice. As social media emerged, #EarnTheStar and #EarningTheStar became popular Twitter hashtags for Cowboy fans and players.


title: Bill Parcells

text: In his first season with the Cowboys, he led them to the playoffs with a 10–6 record (losing to the eventual NFC Champion Carolina Panthers in the opening round), making him the first head coach in NFL history to guide four teams to the playoffs.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The 2004 season was one of turmoil. Starting quarterback Quincy Carter was terminated for alleged drug use in favor of 40-year-old veteran Vinny Testaverde, who had been brought to the Cowboys from the New York Jets by his former coach in the off-season. While a favorite of Coach Parcells, Testaverde proved ineffective as a starter. The Cowboys started strong, with victories against the Cleveland Browns and Washington Redskins, but injuries, older personnel, spotty play-calling, and persistent penalties hobbled the Cowboys, and they quickly fell off to a 3–5 record by midseason, finishing the season 6–10.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The Cowboys improved their defense before the 2005 season with the additions of first-round draft picks DeMarcus Ware and Marcus Spears. Parcells drafted these players in hopes of jumpstarting the team's transition from the traditional 4–3 defense to a 3–4 defense, which Parcells had run in all of his previous stops. Jerry Jones also added a number of high-priced older veteran players, acquiring nose tackle Jason Ferguson and cornerback Anthony Henry via free agency, and linebacker Scott Fujita via the Kansas City Chiefs. On offense, the Cowboys felt the need to upgrade their passing game to complement their top 2004 draft pick, running back Julius Jones, and acquired quarterback Drew Bledsoe via free agency. During his tenure, Parcells made a point of signing players who had played for him in the past, including Bledsoe, Terry Glenn (with the Patriots), Testaverde, cornerback Aaron Glenn, wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson, and fullback Richie Anderson with the Jets. In 2005, the Cowboys went 9–7, missing the playoffs by one game.


title: Bill Parcells

text: In 2006 the Cowboys signed controversial former Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens. Keyshawn Johnson was released and signed with the Carolina Panthers. Owens, whom Parcells never referred to by name, but rather as "The Player", was fairly successful with the team. In week 7 of the 2006 season, Parcells decided to replace veteran quarterback Drew Bledsoe with fourth-year quarterback Tony Romo. The Cowboys were 6–4 with Romo as the starter. They finished the season with a 9–7 overall record but failed to win the NFC East Division after a 23–7 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on Christmas Day in week 16 followed by a loss to the last-place team in the NFC North, the Detroit Lions in week 17. They were able to clinch a playoff berth as the 5th seed in the NFC, eventually losing 21–20 against the Seahawks in Seattle on January 6, on a botched hold by Tony Romo during a field goal attempt.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Parcells would finish his Dallas stint with a 34–30 record and no playoff wins. Parcells' greatest accomplishment as Cowboys head coach was the development of quarterback Tony Romo. He signed Romo in 2003 and developed him into a Pro Bowl quarterback by 2006.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Parcells would have entered the final year of his contract with the Cowboys in 2007, and had been facing questions all year as to whether he would return to the Cowboys to coach his final season. With his 0–2 playoff record over four years as coach of Dallas, many had begun to wonder if the game had simply "passed him by." Immediately following the Cowboys' loss to the Seattle Seahawks, Parcells said that he was unsure if he would return in 2007, and the rumors about Parcells' future escalated.


title: Bill Parcells

text: On January 9, the "Newark Star Ledger" reported through anonymous sources that Parcells had contacted the New York Giants about their available general manager position, but the Giants were not interested in Parcells' services. Parcells, the next day, quickly refuted any interest in the position, stating, "There is absolutely nothing to it. Whoever said it is a liar."


title: Bill Parcells

text: On January 22, 2007, he announced his retirement as head coach of the Cowboys after 4 years, apparently ending his coaching career.


title: Bill Parcells

text: Evidently, there are still questions as to his specific reasons for leaving the game. There were even reports that Parcells had been holding out for more money, and that Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones simply did not think Parcells's performance was worth the money he was demanding for the upcoming season.


title: Bill Parcells

text: After retiring from coaching, Parcells became a studio analyst for ESPN. This was his fourth stint with the network, having worked there before accepting the job in Dallas, where he coached both the Dallas Cowboys and a little league team for charity. It was rumored that ESPN offered him a position on "Monday Night Football", but Parcells declined the opportunity. (It is also worth noting that ESPN still held a contract with Parcells as a broadcaster even as he coached the Cowboys.)


title: Bill Parcells

text: On December 19, 2007, the Miami Herald reported that Parcells had agreed to become the new Executive Vice President of Football Operations of the Miami Dolphins. ESPN reported the following day that he signed a four-year contract. Just a day prior, reports linking Parcells to the Atlanta Falcons' position of vice president of football operations were leaked. However, the following day the Falcons formally announced that Parcells had turned down the offer because of discussions with Miami.


title: Bill Parcells

text: In the first season as Executive Vice President of Football Operations, Parcells fired head coach Cam Cameron, general manager Randy Mueller, along with a few assistant coaches, after a 1–15 finish in the 2007 season. With vacancies at the general manager and head coaching spots, he brought in Jeff Ireland to be the general manager and signed Tony Sparano as head coach.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The new front office under Parcells then signed over 20 little-known players in the free-agent market.


title: Bill Parcells

text: In the 2008 draft, they drafted offensive tackle Jake Long with the No. 1 overall pick, along with Phillip Merling, Kendall Langford, Chad Henne, Lex Hilliard, and Donald Thomas. They also signed undrafted free agents Dan Carpenter and Davone Bess.


title: Bill Parcells

text: They also released fan favorite Zach Thomas, who would end up signing with the Dallas Cowboys, and traded star defensive end Jason Taylor to the Washington Redskins for a second-round pick in the 2009 draft.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The Dolphins then went on to sign quarterback Chad Pennington (drafted by Parcells in his Jets days), who had been cut by the Jets to make room for Brett Favre.


title: Bill Parcells

text: The Dolphins finished the 2008 season 11–5 and became AFC East champions when Pennington and the Dolphins defeated Favre and the Jets in the final game of the season. They finished with a 10-game improvement from the previous season, making the Dolphins one of two teams in NFL history to accomplish a 10-game turnaround, the other being the 1999 Indianapolis Colts. It was also the first time since 2001 that the Dolphins made the playoffs. However, they were routed in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens, 27–9.


title: Bill Parcells

text: In March 2012, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton was suspended for the entire 2012 season by the NFL for not reporting a bounty system set up by his defense from 2009 to 2011. Upon his suspension, Payton asked his former mentor Parcells if he would be interested in filling the head coaching vacancy. On April 11, 2012, Parcells revealed in an interview with Mike Tirico that he had decided against joining the Saints but would help Payton in any way he could.


title: Stephen Murphy (civil servant)

text: Stephen E. Murphy (born 1957) is an American retired federal agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who, along with Javier Peña, was one of the lead investigators in the manhunt of Colombian drug lord and leader of the Medellín Cartel, Pablo Escobar.


title: Stephen Murphy (civil servant)

text: Murphy grew up in Princeton, West Virginia where he graduated from Princeton High School in 1974 and attended West Virginia University for a year. He served as a Police Officer in the City of Bluefield, West Virginia from 1975 to 1977. He transferred to Bluefield State College, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice in 1981. He joined the DEA in 1987 and started working in Miami, where he stayed for four years, before being transferred to Bogotá, Colombia.


title: Stephen Murphy (civil servant)

text: He played an important role in the killing of Escobar, and was first on the scene with a working camera when Pablo Escobar was shot dead on a Medellín roof. A photograph of Murphy holding the body of Escobar is widely known, with Murphy claiming he was "caught up in the moment". After Escobar's death, in December 1993, he returned to the United States, where he continued to work with the DEA until his retirement in July 2013. Today he heads a law-enforcement private consulting firm and travels around the world giving speeches and telling the true story of Pablo Escobar alongside his lifelong partner Javier Peña. Murphy and his wife Connie have two adopted daughters from Colombia and two biological sons.


title: Stephen Murphy (civil servant)

text: His character was played by actor Boyd Holbrook in the Netflix TV series "Narcos". Murphy and Peña worked as consultants on the show and made a cameo appearance in the last episode of Season 2, "Al Fin Cayó!"


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: Jo Jung-suk (born December 26, 1980) is a South Korean actor. He began his career in theater, starring in "Spring Awakening", "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", and the stage adaptation of "The Harmonium in My Memory", among many other musicals and plays.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: After nearly a decade on the stage, Jo made his film debut as a comedic supporting actor in the 2012 box office hit "Architecture 101", which became his breakout role. His versatility was further showcased by the television series "The King 2 Hearts" (2012), "You're the Best, Lee Soon-shin" (2013), "Oh My Ghost" (2015), "Don't Dare to Dream" (2016), "Hospital Playlist" (2020), as well as films "The Face Reader" (2013), "My Love, My Bride" (2014), "My Annoying Brother" (2016), "Exit (2019)".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: Jo Jung-suk had always wanted to be on stage. He was admitted into the Theater department of Seoul Institute of the Arts on student loan, but after his father died in 2000, Jo's widowed mother became fully dependent on him. He was granted an exemption from military service due to family circumstances, and he quit school before graduating so he could start earning money by doing musicals. He made his professional acting debut in "The Nutcracker" in 2004.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: Jo then became active and well known in musical theatre, acting in a total of 25 musicals during the first nine years of his career, including "Organ in My Heart" (musical adaptation of "The Harmonium in My Memory"), "Janggeum the Great" (musical adaptation of "Jewel in the Palace"), and Korean productions of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", "Grease", "The Island", and "Spring Awakening".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2011 he landed his first television role on cable series "What's Up" as an awkward but talented music student. But 2012 would be his breakout year, starring in two high-profile projects. In his big screen debut, he played a supporting role in box office hit "Architecture 101". As the young hero's best friend Nab-ddeuk, Jo's performance brimmed with personality and comic timing, and he won Best New Actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards, as well as received nominations from the Grand Bell Awards and Buil Film Awards. He was once again a scene stealer in his third onscreen role as earnest soldier Eun Shi-kyung in the drama series "The King 2 Hearts". Jo's display of versatility and screen presence in those projects caused a surge in mainstream popularity for the actor, resulting in close to twenty offers for films and TV series, not to mention commercials.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: He next starred in big-screen comedy "Almost Che", loosely based on a real-life incident from 1985, in which student activists forcibly occupied the US Cultural Center in Seoul and had a standoff with the police. After filming the period drama Song Kang-ho-starred "The Face Reader" (for which he later won Best Supporting Actor at the Grand Bell Awards), Jo returned to television in his first onscreen leading role in the 2013 family drama "You're the Best, Lee Soon-shin".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: Jo appeared in two films in 2014: the period thriller "The Fatal Encounter", where he played an assassin targeting King Jeongjo, and the romantic comedy "My Love, My Bride", a remake of the same-titled 1990 hit in which he and Shin Min-ah played a newly married couple.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2015, Jo played an arrogant star chef who falls for his kitchen assistant who's been possessed by a virgin ghost in "Oh My Ghost", which was a commercial and critical hit. He also headlined "", in which he played a TV news reporter who gets a scoop, followed by the time-hopping thriller "Time Renegade".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2016, Jo played an announcer in SBS's romantic comedy "Don't Dare to Dream" who falls for a weather announcer (played by Gong Hyo-jin). The series was a hit and led to increased popularity for Jo, who then became one of the most in-demand actors in the industry. He then headlined the comedy-drama film "My Annoying Brother" alongside Park Shin-hye and Do Kyung-soo of Exo. The film topped box office charts and earned positive reviews for Jo, who was praised for his comedic timing and chemistry with co-star Do.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2017, Jo was cast in the gangster thriller "The Drug King", directed by Woo Min-ho. The same year, he made his small-screen comeback in MBC's fantasy comedy drama "Two Cops".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2018, Jo was cast in the action thriller film "Hit-and-Run Squad" in which he took a role as an antagonist, as well as the disaster action film "Exit".


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2020, Jo starred in the medical drama "Hospital Playlist", as Lee Ik-jun, an assistant professor of general surgery. He reprised his role in season 2 in 2021.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In 2022, Jo hosts the 2022 "Jo Jung-suk Show" at Mastercard Hall in Blue Square, Seoul for two days at 6 PM on September 3 and 5 PM on 4.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: In June 2018, it was announced that Jo would marry Gummy in fall. On October 8, 2018, news broke that the couple got married privately.


title: Jo Jung-suk

text: On January 6, 2020, Gummy's agency confirmed that she was 7 weeks pregnant with the couple's first child. On August 6, 2020, Jo Jung Seok and wife Gummy welcomed their first daughter.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi won the 2010 and 2020 Russian Superfinal and the 2010 European Individual titles. He also won the 2016 Tal Memorial and both the 2008 and 2015 Aeroflot Open events. He won the World Team Chess Championship as a member of the Russian team in Antalya (2013) and Astana (2019). Nepomniachtchi won the 2015 European Team Chess Championship in Reykjavík with the Russian team.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In October 2016, Nepomniachtchi was ranked fourth in the world in both rapid chess and blitz chess. He has won two silver medals in the World Rapid Championship and a silver medal at the World Blitz Championship as well as winning the 2008 Ordix Open. In December 2019, he qualified for the Candidates Tournament 2020–2021 by finishing second in the FIDE Grand Prix 2019. He won the 2021 FIDE Candidates tournament with a round to spare, which qualified him as the challenger in the World Chess Championship 2021 for the world championship title but lost his challenge to defending champion Magnus Carlsen. In July 2022, he won the 2022 FIDE Candidates tournament with a round to spare, thereby winning two Candidates tournaments in a row and again qualifying him to play in the World Chess Championship 2023; additionally, he garnered the highest score in any Candidates tournament since the modern format was introduced in 2013. In October 2022, he won a silver medal in FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship 2022.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi learned to play chess at the age of four. His grandfather Boris Iosifovich Nepomniashchy (1929–1998) was a famous teacher and lyricist in Bryansk. Ian's first coaches were his uncle Igor Nepomniashchy, Valentin Evdokimenko, international master Valery Zilberstein and grandmaster Sergei Yanovsky. At the age of five, Ian moved to Bryansk with his first coach, Valentin Evdokimenko, and trained until Ian was thirteen. Under the guidance of his coach, he took part in the World and European Championships.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi won the European Youth Chess Championship three times. In 2000, he won the under-10 category, and in 2001 and 2002, he came first in the U12 championship. In 2002, Nepomniachtchi also won the World Youth Chess Championship in the U12 category, edging out Magnus Carlsen on tiebreak score.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In 2007, he finished second in the C group of the Corus Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee earning his first grandmaster (GM) norm. Later that same year, Nepomniachtchi gained his second GM norm at the European Individual Chess Championship in Dresden. The third and final norm required for the GM title was won at the "5th Vanya Somov Memorial – World's Youth Stars" tournament in Kirishi. Nepomniachtchi won the latter event, edging out Rauf Mamedov, Parimarjan Negi and Zaven Andriasian on tiebreak score.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: By winning the Aeroflot Open in Moscow in February 2008, he qualified for the 2008 Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting. In this tournament, he shared second place after an undefeated run. In the same year, he also won the Ordix Open, a rapid chess tournament in Mainz.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In 2010, in Rijeka, Nepomniachtchi won the European Individual Championship with a score of 9/11. Later the same year, in Moscow, he won the Russian Chess Championship, after defeating Sergey Karjakin in a playoff.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In November 2011, Nepomniachtchi tied for 3rd–5th with Vasily Ivanchuk and Sergey Karjakin in the category 22 Tal Memorial in Moscow.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In May 2013, Nepomniachtchi tied for 1st–8th with Alexander Moiseenko, Evgeny Romanov, Alexander Beliavsky, Constantin Lupulescu, Francisco Vallejo Pons, Sergei Movsesian, Hrant Melkumyan, Alexey Dreev and Evgeny Alekseev in the European Individual Championship. The following month, Nepomniachtchi finished second to Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in the World Rapid Chess Championship, held in Khanty-Mansiysk. In October 2013, he tied for first with Peter Svidler in the Russian Championship Superfinal, finishing second on tiebreak.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Over the course of 2013, Nepomniachtchi's blitz rating surged from 2689 in January, to 2830 in December.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi won the silver medal at the World Blitz Chess Championship of 2014 held in Dubai. In August, at the 5th International Chess Festival “Yaroslav the Wise” in Yaroslavl, he won the Tournament of Champions, a rapid chess event held with the double round-robin format featuring the six European champions of 2009–2014. At the SportAccord World Mind Games, held in December 2014 in Beijing, he won the gold medal in the men's Basque chess tournament.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In April 2015, he won the Aeroflot Open for the second time in his career, edging out Daniil Dubov on tiebreak, having played more games with the black pieces, and earned a spot in the 2015 Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting. Right after the end of the tournament he also won the Aeroflot blitz tournament. Later that year, in September, he won the Moscow Blitz Championship and one month later, he took the silver medal at the World Rapid Chess Championship in Berlin.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: At the 42nd Chess Olympiad, held in 2016, he won the team bronze medal and an individual silver playing board 4 for Russia.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: On 10 December 2017, Ian won a chess game against world champion Magnus Carlsen at the super tournament in London. In the tournament Nepomniachtchi, who was the leader after 8 rounds (+3-0=5), lost in a tie-break to Fabiano Caruana, who managed to catch up with the leader in the 9th round, and took 2nd place. On 27 December 2017, he took third place in the World Rapid Chess Championship, which ended in Riyadh.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In July 2018, he won the 46th Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting, scoring 5/7 (+3–0=4) to finish a point ahead of his nearest competitors.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In January 2019, Nepomniachtchi competed in the 81st Tata Steel Masters, placing third with 7½/13 (+4–2=7).


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In late May of the same year, he participated in the Moscow FIDE Grand Prix tournament, which was part of the qualification cycle for the 2020 World Chess Championship. The tournament was a 16-player event. Nepomniachtchi defeated GM Alexander Grischuk in rapid tiebreaks during the finale, winning the tournament. This brought him a total of 9 Grand Prix points, placing him at the top of the scoreboard.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In December 2020, he won the Russian championship with 7.5 points out of eleven matches, edging out GM Sergey Karjakin by half a point.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In April 2021, Nepomniachtchi won the 2020/2021 Candidates tournament with 8.5/14 points (+5-2=7) half a point above second place Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. The Candidates win qualified Nepomniachtchi to challenge Magnus Carlsen in a match for the World Chess Championship in November–December 2021. Carlsen retained his title, winning 7½-3½.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In August 2021 Nepomniachtchi was Russia’s highest-ranked chess player, with a rating of 2792. This placed him fourth in the world and second in Europe (after Magnus Carlsen).


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: From 26–28 December 2021, Nepomniachtchi participated in the 2021 FIDE World Rapid Championship, where he ended up as one of the joint leaders with 9.5/13 points, and scored second place after tiebreaks. As a result, he qualified for a playoff against Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who also had 9.5/13 points and scored first place after tiebreaks. Nepomniachtchi held Abdusattorov to a draw in their first playoff game, but lost in the second. As a result, he ended up with second place in the event.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In December 2021 Nepomniachtchi played a friendly match with Nornickel president Vladimir Potanin, which ended with victory for the grandmaster in the 38th move.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi qualified for the 2022 Candidates tournament as the World Championship runner-up, and took an early lead in the tournament. He competed under the FIDE flag, following FIDE's suspension of the Russian and Belarusian teams from international competition. In round 13, Nepomniachtchi clinched a victory in the Candidates after securing a draw against Richárd Rapport, going into the 14th and final round with a lead of 1.5 points. This guaranteed him qualification for the World Chess Championship 2023. He is the first player to win the Candidates tournament undefeated since Viswanathan Anand in 2014; additionally, he got the highest score of 9.5/14 in any Candidates tournament since the modern format was introduced in 2013.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In addition to his strength in classical time controls, Nepomniachtchi is very skilled at rapid and blitz chess. As of June 2021, Ian ranked 5th on the FIDE rapid list and 10th on the blitz list.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Nepomniachtchi is Jewish. He is often referred to by the nickname "Nepo". He graduated from the Russian State Social University.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: Together with 43 other Russian elite chess players, Nepomniachtchi signed an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin in March 2022, protesting against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people.


title: Ian Nepomniachtchi

text: In 2006, he was introduced to the video game "Defense of the Ancients" ("Dota"), later becoming a semiprofessional "Dota 2" player. He was a member of the team that won the Winter 2011 "Dota" tournament, and also served as a commentator at the ESL One Hamburg 2018 "Dota 2" tournament, using the nickname "FrostNova". He also plays "Hearthstone" and introduced fellow Russian chess grandmaster Peter Svidler to the game. The two of them later provided feedback about the game to the "Hearthstone" developers.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The Palace of the Parliament (), also known as the Republic's House () or People's House/People's Palace (), is the seat of the Parliament of Romania, located atop Dealul Spirii in Bucharest, the national capital. The Palace reaches a height of , has a floor area of and a volume of . The Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest building in the world, weighing about , also being the second largest administrative building in the world. (The Great Pyramid of Giza is about 50% heavier.)


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The building was designed and supervised by chief architect Anca Petrescu, with a team of approximately 700 architects, and constructed over a period of 13 years (1984–97) in Socialist realist and modernist Neoclassical architectural forms and styles, with socialist realism in mind. The Palace was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989), the president of Communist Romania and the second of two long-ruling heads of state in the country since World War II, during a period in which the personality cult of political worship and adoration increased considerably for him and his family.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Known for its ornate interior composed of 23 sections, the palace houses the two chambers of the Parliament of Romania: the Senate ("Senat") and the Chamber of Deputies ("Camera Deputaților"), along with three museums and an international conference center. The museums in the Palace are the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Communist Totalitarianism (established in 2015) and the Museum of the Palace. Though originally named the House of the Republic when under construction (), the palace became widely known as The People's House () after the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Due to its impressive characteristics, events organized by state institutions and international bodies such as conferences and symposia take place there, but despite this about 70% of the building remains empty.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: , the Palace of the Parliament is valued at €4 billion, making it the most expensive administrative building in the world. The cost of heating, electricity, and lighting alone exceeds $6 million per year.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The Palace is in Sector 5 in the central part of Bucharest, at the top of Dealul Spirii (Spirea's Hill), also known as Dealul Arsenalului (Arsenal Hill). It is at the west end of the Bulevardul Unirii (Union Boulevard), constructed at the same time as the Palace, and is ringed by Izvor Street to the west and northwest, United Nations Avenue to the north, Liberty Avenue to the east and Calea 13 Septembrie to the south.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The construction of the Palace of the Parliament was the most extreme expression of the systematization program imposed on Romania by Nicolae Ceaușescu. Systematization was a program of urban planning carried out by Ceaușescu, who was impressed by the societal organization and mass adulation he saw in North Korea's Juche ideology during his East Asia visit in 1971. Ceaușescu decided to implement similar policies in his country, with the stated goal of turning Romania into a "multilaterally developed socialist society."


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: A systematization project had existed since the 1930s (during the time of King Carol II) for the Unirii–Dealul Arsenalului area. The Vrancea earthquake of 4 March 1977 gave Ceaușescu a pretext to demolish parts of old Bucharest. He wanted a civic center more in line with the country's political stance and started a reconstruction plan of Bucharest based on the socialist realism style. The House of the Republic was the centrepiece of Ceaușescu's project. Named "Project Bucharest", it began in 1978 as an intended replica of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. North Korean President Kim Il-sung had started construction on a similarly monumental residence, the Kumsusan Palace, two years earlier.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: A contest was held and won by Anca Petrescu (1949–2013), who was appointed chief architect of the project at the age of 28. The team that coordinated the work was made up of 10 assisting architects, which supervised a further 700. Construction of the palace began on 25 June 1984, and the inauguration of the work was attended by Ceaușescu, who also frequently inspected the site.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Uranus Hill was leveled so the building could be erected. The area had also been home to the National Archives, Mihai Vodă Monastery and other monasteries, Brâncovenesc Hospital, as well as about 37 old factories and workshops. Demolition in the Uranus area began in 1982. Approximately of the old city centre were demolished, with 40,000 people being relocated from the area.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Between 20,000 and 100,000 people worked on the site and project, operating in three shifts made up of 5,000 Romanian People's Army soldiers and huge numbers of "volunteers". A controversy is how many people died, official data suggest 27 but individuals who worked or were forced to work here talk of a much higher number, some say thousands.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: In 1989, the building costs were estimated at US$1.75 billion, and in 2006 at US$3 billion. In 1990, Australian-born business and media magnate Rupert Murdoch tried to buy the building for US$1 billion, but his bid was rejected.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Since 1994, the palace has housed the lower house of the Romanian Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, after its former seat, the Palace of the Chamber of Deputies (now the Palace of the Patriarchate), was donated by the State to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Since 2004, the upper house, the Senate of Romania, has also been housed in the Palace of the Parliament, after having left the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Six years after the palace's completion, between 2003 and 2004, a glass annex was built alongside the external elevators. This was done to facilitate outside access to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2004 in the west wing of the palace. During the same period, a project aiming to hoist a huge flag was cancelled following public protests. A flag already hoisted outside the building was also removed after the protests.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: A restaurant inside the palace, accessible only to politicians, was refurbished. Since 1998, the building has also housed an office for the Regional Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) Centre for Fighting Transborder Crime.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: In 2008, the Palace hosted the 20th summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 2010, politician Silviu Prigoană proposed re-purposing the building into a shopping centre and entertainment complex. Citing costs, Prigoană said that the Romanian Parliament should move to a new building, since they occupied only 30% of the massive palace. While the proposal sparked debate in Romania, politician Miron Mitrea dismissed the idea as a "joke".


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The palace has also been the background for several motorsports events, including the 2011 Drift Grand Prix Romania, which brought together professional drifters from all over Europe.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Although the Palace of the Parliament was financed from public funds and the architects did work for hire, after the death of chief architect Anca Petrescu, her heirs sued the Chamber of Deputies for using images of the iconic building without authorization. The chamber was accused of copyright infringement for selling photos and souvenirs depicting the building's image. In other lawsuits, the heirs claimed violation of trademarks owned by the chief architect through the depiction of the palace from different angles.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: While legal experts state that no restrictions exist for tourists wishing to photograph the iconic building for non-commercial purposes, Petrescu's heirs have clearly set out that any commercial use of the building's image is subject to a 2% royalty fee. It is believed the situation could have been avoided if an agreement between the chief architect and the beneficiary (Romanian State) had addressed the intellectual property rights and Romania had implemented freedom of panorama, restricting the scope of copyright law in such cases.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Construction of the palace began in 1984 and was initially scheduled for completion in two years. The project was extended to 1990, but remains uncompleted to this day. Only two large meeting rooms and 400 others have been finished or are even being used, out of a total of 1,100.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The building has eight underground levels, the deepest housing a nuclear bunker, linked to main state institutions by of tunnels. Nicolae Ceaușescu feared nuclear war. The bunker is a room with thick concrete walls said to be impervious to radiation. The shelter is composed of a main hall – headquarters which would have had telephone connections with all military units in Romania – and several residential apartments for state leadership, to be used in the event of war.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The palace's floor area of makes it the world's third-largest administrative building after the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. in the United States and the Sappaya-Sapasathan in Thailand. It is also among the most massive buildings in terms of volume, measuring : for comparison, the building exceeds by 2% the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, leading some sources to label it "pharaonic".


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The Palace of the Parliament sinks each year due to its weight. Romanian specialists who have analyzed the data have explained that the palace's massive weight is causing the layers of sediment below the building to settle.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The building was constructed almost entirely of materials of Romanian origin. Among the few exceptions are the doors of Nicolae Bălcescu Hall, received by Ceaușescu as a gift from his friend Mobutu Sese Seko, longtime totalitarian President of Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo).


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: Among the materials are 3,500 tonnes of crystal – 480 chandeliers, 1,409 ceiling lights and mirrors were manufactured; 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze for monumental doors and windows, chandeliers and capitals; of marble, of wood (over 95% domestic) for parquet and wainscotting, including walnut, oak, sweet cherry, elm, sycamore maple; of woollen carpets of various dimensions (machines had to be moved inside the building to weave some of the larger carpets); velvet and brocade curtains adorned with embroideries and passementeries in silver and gold.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: The Palace of the Parliament has featured in a variety of films, most famously as the Vatican in the 2018 horror film "The Nun". Other films include "War Dogs", starring Jonah Hill; "Dying of the Light", starring Nicolas Cage; and "What About Love" (2022), starring Sharon Stone and Andy García.


title: Palace of the Parliament

text: It also appeared on an episode of "Top Gear" in 2009, titled "Romanian GT Road Trip to Find the Transfagarasan Highway".


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Consumer behavior is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. Consumer behaviour consists of how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, marketing, and economics (especially behavioural economics).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The study of consumer behaviour formally investigates individual qualities such as demographics, personality lifestyles, and behavioural variables (such as usage rates, usage occasion, loyalty, brand advocacy, and willingness to provide referrals), in an attempt to understand people's wants and consumption patterns. Consumer behaviour also investigates on the influences on the consumer, from social groups such as family, friends, sports, and reference groups, to society in general (brand-influencers, opinion leaders).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Research has shown that consumer behaviour is difficult to predict, even for experts in the field; however, new research methods, such as ethnography, consumer neuroscience, and machine learning are shedding new light on how consumers make decisions. In addition, customer relationship management (CRM) databases have become an asset for the analysis of customer behaviour. The extensive data produced by these databases enables detailed examination of behavioural factors that contribute to customer re-purchase intentions, consumer retention, loyalty, and other behavioural intentions such as the willingness to provide positive referrals, become brand advocates, or engage in customer citizenship activities. Databases also assist in market segmentation, especially behavioural segmentation such as developing loyalty segments, which can be used to develop tightly targeted customized marketing strategies on a one-to-one basis. (Also see relationship marketing).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In the 1940s and '50s, marketing was dominated by the so-called "classical schools of thought" which were highly descriptive and relied heavily on case study approaches with only occasional use of interview methods. At the end of the 1950s, two important reports criticized marketing for its lack of methodological rigor, especially the failure to adopt mathematically-oriented behavioral science research methods. The stage was set for marketing to become more inter-disciplinary by adopting a consumer-behaviorist perspective.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: From the 1950s, marketing began to shift its reliance away from economics and towards other disciplines, notably the behavioral sciences, including sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology. This resulted in a new emphasis on the customer as a unit of analysis. As a result, new substantive knowledge was added to the marketing discipline – including such ideas as opinion leadership, reference groups, and brand loyalty. Market segmentation, especially demographic segmentation based on socioeconomic status (SES) index and household life-cycle, also became fashionable. With the addition of consumer behavior, the marketing discipline exhibited increasing scientific sophistication with respect to theory development and testing procedures.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In its early years, consumer behavior was heavily influenced by motivation research, which had increased the understanding of customers, and had been used extensively by consultants in the advertising industry and also within the discipline of psychology in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. By the 1950s, marketing began to adopt techniques used by motivation researchers including depth interviews, projective techniques, thematic apperception tests, and a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods. More recently, scholars have added a new set of tools including ethnography, photo-elicitation techniques, and phenomenological interviewing. Today, consumer behavior (or "CB" as it is affectionately known) is regarded as an important sub-discipline within marketing and is included as a unit of study in almost all undergraduate marketing programs.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Consumer behaviour entails "all activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services, including the consumer's emotional, mental and behavioural responses that precede or follow these activities." The term consumer can refer to individual consumers as well as organisational consumers, and more specifically, "an end user, and not necessarily a purchaser, in the distribution chain of a good or service." Consumer behaviour is concerned with:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: According to the American Marketing Association, consumer behaviour can be defined as "the dynamic interaction of affect and cognition, behaviour, and environmental events by which human beings conduct the exchange aspects of their lives."


title: Consumer behaviour

text: As a field of study, consumer behaviour is an applied social science. Consumer behaviour analysis is the "use of behaviour principles, usually gained experimentally, to interpret human economic consumption." As a discipline, consumer behaviour stands at the intersection of economic psychology and marketing science.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Understanding purchase and consumption behaviour is a key challenge for marketers. Consumer behaviour, in its broadest sense, is concerned with understanding both how purchase decisions are made and how products or services are consumed or experienced. Consumers are active decision-makers. They decide what to purchase, often based on their disposable income or budget. They may change their preferences related to their budget and a range of other factors.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Some purchase decisions involve long, detailed processes that include extensive information search to select between competing alternatives. Other purchase decisions, such as impulse buys or habitual purchases, are made almost instantaneously with little or no investment of time or effort in information search.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Some purchase decisions are made by groups (such as families, households or businesses) while others are made by individuals. When a purchase decision is made by a small group, such as a household, different members of the group may become involved at different stages of the decision process and may perform different roles. For example, one person may suggest the purchase category, another may search for product-related information while yet another may physically go to the store, buy the product, and transport it home. It is customary to think about the types of decision roles; such as:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: For most purchase decisions, each of the decision roles must be performed, but not always by the same individual. For example, in the case of family making a decision about a dining-out venue, a parent may initiate the process by intimating that they are too tired to cook. The children are important influencers in the overall purchase decision, but both parents may act as joint deciders performing a gate-keeping role by vetoing unacceptable alternatives and encouraging more acceptable alternatives. The importance of children as influencers in a wide range of purchase contexts should never be underestimated and the phenomenon is known as pester power.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: To approach the mental processes used in purchasing decisions, some authors employ the concept of the black box, which represents the cognitive and affective processes used by a consumer during a purchase decision. The decision model situates the black box in a broader environment which shows the interaction of external and internal stimuli (e.g. consumer characteristics, situational factors, marketing influences, and environmental factors) as well as consumer responses. The black box model is related to the black box theory of behaviourism, where the focus extends beyond processes occurring "inside" the consumer and also includes the "relation" between the stimuli and the consumer's response.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The decision model assumes that purchase decisions do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they occur in real time and are affected by other stimuli, including external environmental stimuli and the consumer's momentary situation. The elements of the model include interpersonal stimuli (between people) or intrapersonal stimuli (within people), environmental stimuli and marketing stimuli. Marketing stimuli include actions planned and carried out by companies, whereas environmental stimuli include actions or events occurring in the wider operating environment and include social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions. In addition, the buyer's black box includes buyer characteristics and the decision process, which influence the buyer's responses.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The first stage of the purchase decision process begins with "problem recognition" (also known as category need or need arousal). This is when the consumer identifies a need, typically defined as the difference between the consumer's current state and their desired or ideal state. A simpler way of thinking about problem recognition is that it is where the consumer decides that they are 'in the market' for a product or service to satisfy some need or want. The strength of the underlying need drives the entire decision process.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Theorists identify three broad classes of problem-solving situation relevant for the purchase decision:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: During the information search and evaluation stages, the consumer works through processes designed to arrive at a number of brands (or products) that represent viable purchase alternatives. Typically consumers first carry out an internal search and scan their memory for suitable brands. The evoked set is the set of brands that a consumer can elicit from memory and is typically a very small set of some 3- 5 alternatives. Consumers may choose to supplement the number of brands in the evoked set by carrying out an "external search" using sources such as the Internet, manufacturer/brand websites, shopping around, product reviews, referrals from peers and the like. The readiness of information availability has raised the informedness of the consumers: the degree to which they know what is available in the marketplace, with precisely which attributes, and at precisely what price.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The fact that a consumer is aware of a brand does not necessarily mean that it is being considered as a potential purchase. For instance, the consumer may be aware of certain brands, but not favourably disposed towards them (known as the "inept set"). Such brands will typically be excluded from further evaluation as purchase options. For other brands, the consumer may have indifferent feelings (the "inert set"). As the consumer approaches the actual purchase, they distill the mental list of brands into a set of alternatives that represent realistic purchase options, known as the "consideration set". By definition, the consideration set refers to the “small set of brands which a consumer pays close attention to when making a purchase decision”. This ultimately leads to a "choice set" which includes the alternatives that are strong contenders for purchase.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Specific brand names enter the consumer's consideration set based on the extent to which they satisfy the consumer's purchasing objectives and/or the salience or accessibility of the brand at the time of making the purchase decision. By implication, brand names that are more memorable are more likely to be accessible. Traditionally, one of the main roles of advertising and promotion was to increase the likelihood that a brand name was included in the consumer's evoked set. Repeated exposure to brand names through intensive advertising was the primary method for increasing "top-of-mind brand awareness". However, the advent of the Internet means that consumers can obtain brand/product information from a multiplicity of different platforms. In practice, the consideration set has assumed greater importance in the purchase decision process because consumers are no longer totally reliant on memory. This is marketing, which could be defined as “the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships, in order to capture value from customers in return.” This definition strongly implies that the relationship is built upon an exchange and the "creation" of value. This means that a need is built for a consumer, with the product presented or advertised to them through an analytical study of the user's patterns of consumption and their behaviors and habits. The implication for marketers is that relevant brand information should be disseminated as widely as possible and included on any forum where consumers are likely to search for product or brand information, whether traditional media or digital media channels. Thus, marketers require a rich understanding of the typical consumer's touchpoints.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Consumer evaluation can be viewed as a distinct stage. Alternatively, evaluation may occur continuously throughout the entire decision process. Consumers evaluate alternatives in terms of the functional (also called "utilitarian") and psycho-social (also called the "value-expressive" or the "symbolic") benefits offered.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Brand image (or brand personality) is an important psycho-social attribute. Consumers can have both positive and negative beliefs about a given brand. A considerable body of research suggests that consumers are predisposed towards brands with a personality that matches their own and that a good match can affect brand preference, brand choice, satisfaction with a brand, brand commitment and loyalty, and the consumer's propensity to give positive word-of-mouth referrals. The branch of consumer behaviour that investigates the matching of a brand's personality and the consumer's personality is known as "self-congruity research." The social media presence of a brand plays a huge part in this stage, with the effect described as “Think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter. Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate too.” Consumer beliefs about a brand or product category may vary depending on a range of factors including the consumer's prior experience and the effects of selective perception, distortion, and retention. Consumers who are less knowledgeble about a category tend to evaluate a brand based on its functional characteristics. However, when consumers become more knowledgeable, functional attributes diminish and consumers process more abstract information about the brand, notably the self-related aspects.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The marketing organization needs a deep understanding of the benefits most valued by consumers and therefore which attributes are most important in terms of the consumer's purchase decision. It also needs to monitor other brands in the customer's consideration set to optimise planning for its own brand. During the evaluation of alternatives, the consumer ranks or assesses the relative merits of different options available. No universal evaluation process is used by consumers across all-buying situations. Instead, consumers generate different evaluation criteria depending on each unique buying situation. Social media further enables consumers to share views with their peers about the product they are looking to purchase. This way, consumers can gauge the positive and negative sides of each alternative, and decide even more conveniently as for the best product to buy. Thus the relevant evaluation attributes vary according to across different types of consumers and purchase contexts. For example, attributes important for evaluating a restaurant would include food quality, price, location, atmosphere, quality of service, and menu selection. Consumers, depending on their geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics, will decide which attributes are important to them. Potential patrons seeking a pleasant dining experience may be willing to travel further distances to patronise a fine-dining venue compared to those wanting a quick meal at a more utilitarian eatery. After evaluating the different product attributes, the consumer ranks each attribute or benefit from highly important to least important. These priorities are directly related to the consumer's needs and wants. Thus, the consumer arrives at a weighted score for each product or brand which represents the consumer's subjective assessment of individual attribute scores weighted in terms of their importance. Using these scores, they arrive at a total mental score or rank for each product/brand under consideration.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Once the alternatives have been evaluated, the consumer firms up their resolve to proceed through to the actual purchase. For example, the consumer might say to themself, "Yes, I will buy Brand X one day." This self instruction to make a purchase is known as "purchase intent." Purchase intentions are a strong yet imperfect predictor of sales. Sometimes purchase intentions simply do not translate into an actual purchase and this can signal a marketing problem. For instance, a consumer may wish to buy a new product, but may be unaware of the retail outlets that stock it, so that purchase cannot proceed. The extent to which purchase intentions result in actual sales is known as the "sales conversion" rate.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Organizations use a variety of techniques to improve conversion rates. The provision of easy credit or payment terms may encourage purchase. Sales promotions such as the opportunity to receive a premium or enter a competition may provide an incentive to buy now rather than defer purchases for a later date. Advertising messages with a strong "call-to-action" are yet another device used to convert customers. A call-to-action is any device designed to encourage immediate sale. Typically, a call-to-action includes specific wording in an advertisement or selling pitch that employs imperative verbs such as "Buy now!" or "Don't wait!". Other types of calls-to-action might provide consumers with strong reasons for purchasing immediately such an offer that is only available for a limited time (e.g. 'Offer must expire soon'; 'Limited stocks available') or a special deal usually accompanied by a time constraint (e.g. 'Order before midnight to receive a free gift with your order'; 'Two for the price of one for the first 50 callers only'). Additionally, service convenience is a saving of effort, in the way that it minimizes the activities that customers may bear to buy goods and services. The key to a powerful call-to-action is to provide consumers with compelling reasons to purchase promptly rather than defer purchase decisions.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: As consumers approach the actual purchase decision, they are more likely to rely on personal sources of information. For this reason, personal sales representatives must be well versed in giving sales pitches and in tactics used to close the sale. Methods used might include ‘social evidence’, where the salesperson refers to previous success and satisfaction from other customers buying the product. ‘Scarcity attraction’ is another technique, where the salesperson mentions that the offer is limited, as it forces the consumer to make a quicker decision and therefore spend less time evaluating alternatives.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Following purchase and after experiencing the product or service, the consumer enters the final stage, namely post-purchase evaluation. Foxall suggested that post-purchase evaluation can provide key feedback to marketers because it influences future purchase patterns and consumption activities.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The post purchase stage is where the consumer examines and compares product features, such as price, functionality, and quality with their expectations. Post purchase evaluation can be viewed as the steps taken by consumers to correlate their expectations with perceived value and thus influence their next purchase decision for that good or service. For example, if a consumer buys a new phone and their post-purchase evaluation is positive, they will be encouraged to purchase the same brand or from the same company in the future. This is also known as "post-purchase intention". On the contrary, if a consumer is dissatisfied with the new phone, they may take actions to resolve the dissatisfaction. Consumer actions, in this instance, could involve requesting a refund, making a complaint, deciding not to purchase the same brand or from the same company in the future, or even spreading negative product reviews to friends or acquaintances, possibly via social media.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: After acquisition, consumption, or disposition, consumers may feel some uncertainty in regards to the decision made, generating in some cases regret. Post-decision dissonance (also known as cognitive dissonance) is the feeling of anxiety that occurs in the post purchase stage, as well as the uneasy feelings or concerns as to whether or not the correct decision was made at purchase. Some consumers, for instance, may regret that they did not purchase one of the other brands they were considering. This type of anxiety can affect consumers' subsequent behaviour and may have implications for repeat patronage and customer loyalty.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Consumers use a number of strategies to reduce post purchase dissonance. A typical strategy is to look to peers or significant others for validation of the purchase choice. Customers have always been led by the opinions of friends and family, but nowadays this is corroborated by social media likes, reviews, and testimonials. Marketing communications can also be used to remind consumers that they made a wise choice by purchasing Brand X.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: When consumers make unfavorable comparisons between the chosen option and the options forgone, they may feel post-decision regret or buyer's remorse. Consumers can also feel short-term regret when they avoid making a purchase decision, however this regret can dissipate over time. Through their experiences consumers can learn and also engage in a process called "hypothesis testing". This refers to the formation of hypotheses about the products or a service through prior experience or word of mouth communications. There are four stages that consumers go through in the hypothesis testing: Hypothesis generation, exposure of evidence, encoding of evidence, and integration of evidence.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: "Consumer awareness" refers to the awareness of the consumption of goods formed by consumers in the long-term shopping environment and purchasing activities.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The change of life concept is the subjective factor of the change of consumer awareness. As people's living standards continue to increase and incomes continue to increase, people's life concepts are constantly changing. Differences in consumer personality are the internal motivations for changes in consumer awareness.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Intensified market competition is a catalyst for changes in consumer awareness. Many companies have launched their own branded products in order to gain a foothold in an increasingly competitive market. In the face of a variety of goods and brands, consumers' brand awareness matures. When people buy goods, paying attention to the brand has become a fashion. Faced with the severe competition situation, companies began to realize the importance of implementing brand strategy, and began to focus on market research, and on this basis, deeply grasp the consumer's psychological pulse to improve market share and brand loyalty.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: With the change of people's life concept, consumers' rational consumption psychology has become increasingly prominent. Social Marketing, Customized Marketing, brand-name shopping, and the consumer's perception of the price of the commodity (directly expressed as the consumer's sensitivity to price) are all main factors for understanding consumer attitudes, and help explain the reaction of market demand to price changes.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Internal influences refer to both personal and interpersonal factors. Social theory suggests that individuals have both a "personal identity" and a "social identity". Personal identity consists of unique personal characteristics such as skills and capabilities, interests, and hobbies. Social identity consists of the individual's perception of the central groups to which an individual belongs and may refer to an age group, a lifestyle group, religious group, educational group, or some other reference group. Social psychologists have established that the need to belong is one of the fundamental human needs. Purchasing behaviour is therefore influenced by a broad range of internal factors such as psychological, socio-economic, demographic and personality factors. Demographic factors include income level, psychographics (lifestyles), age, occupation, and socioeconomic status. Personality factors include knowledge, attitudes, personal values, beliefs, emotions, and feelings. Psychological factors include an individual's motivation, attitudes, personal values, and beliefs. Social identity factors include culture, sub-culture, and reference groups. Other factors that may affect the purchase decision include the environment and the consumer's prior experience with the category or brand.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The consumer's underlying motivation drives consumer action, including the information search and purchase decision. The consumer's attitude to a brand (or brand preference) is described as a link between the brand and a purchase motivation. These motivations may be negative (to avoid pain or unpleasantness) or positive (to achieve some type of reward such as sensory gratification).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: One approach to understanding motivations was developed by Abraham Maslow. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is based on five levels of needs, organized accordingly to the level of importance.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Physiological needs and safety needs are the so-called lower order needs. Consumers typically use most of their resources (time, energy, and finances) attempting to satisfy these lower order needs before the higher order needs of belonging, esteem, and self-actualization become meaningful. Part of any marketing program requires an understanding of which motives drive given product choices. Marketing communications can illustrate how a product or brand fulfills these needs. Maslow's approach is a generalised model for understanding human motivations in a wide variety of contexts, but is not specific to purchasing decisions.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Another approach proposes eight "purchase" motivations, five negative motives and three positive motives, which energise purchase decisions as illustrated in the table below. These motivations are believed to provide positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In the marketing literature, the consumer's motivation to search for information and engage in the purchase decision process is sometimes known as "involvement". Consumer involvement has been defined as "the personal relevance or importance of a message [or a decision]". Purchase decisions are classified as low involvement when consumers suffer only a small psycho-social loss in the event that they make a poor decision. On the other hand, a purchase decision is classified as high involvement when psycho-social risks are perceived to be relatively high. The consumer's level of involvement is dependent on a number of factors including perceived risk of negative consequences in the event of a poor decision, the social visibility of the product, and the consumer's prior experience with the product category.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Part of marketing strategy is to ascertain how consumers gain knowledge and use information from external sources. The perception process is where individuals receive, organize, and interpret information in order to attribute some meaning. Perception involves three distinct processes: sensing information, selecting information, and interpreting information. Sensation is also part of the perception process, and it is linked direct with responses from the senses creating some reaction towards the brand name, advertising, and packaging. The process of perception is uniquely individual and may depend on a combination of internal and external factors such as experiences, expectations, needs, and the momentary set.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: When exposed to a stimulus, consumers may respond in entirely different ways due to individual perceptual processes. A number of processes potentially support or interfere with perception. "Selective exposure" occurs when consumers decide whether to be exposed to information inputs. "Selective attention" occurs when consumers focus on some messages to the exclusion of others. "Selective comprehension" is where the consumer interprets information in a manner that is consistent with their own beliefs. "Selective retention" occurs when consumers remember some information while rapidly forgetting other information. Collectively the processes of selective exposure, attention, comprehension, and retention lead individual consumers to favor certain messages over others. The way that consumers combine information inputs to arrive at a purchase decision is known as "integration".


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Marketers are interested in consumer perceptions of brands, packaging, product formulations, labeling, and pricing. Of special interest is the "threshold of perception" (also known as the "just noticeable difference") in a stimulus. For example, how much should a marketer lower a price before consumers recognize it as a bargain? In addition, marketers planning to enter global markets need to be aware of cultural differences in perception. For example, westerners associate the color white with purity, cleanliness, and hygiene, but in eastern countries white is often associated with mourning and death. Accordingly, white packaging would be an inappropriate color choice for food labels on products to be marketed in Asia.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The consumer's prior experience with the category, product, or brand can have a major bearing on purchase decision-making. Experienced consumers (also called experts) are more sophisticated consumers; they tend to be more skillful information searchers, canvass a broader range of information sources, and use complex heuristics to evaluate purchase options. Novice consumers, on the other hand, are less efficient information searchers and tend to perceive higher levels of purchase risk on account of their unfamiliarity with the brand or category. When consumers have prior experience, they have less motivation to search for information and spend less effort on information search but can process new information more efficiently. One study, for example, found that as consumer experience increases, consumers consider a wider range of purchase alternatives (that is, they generate a larger consideration set, but only at the product category level).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Purchasing behaviour can also be affected by external influences, such as culture, sub-culture, social class, reference groups, family, and situational determinants.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Culture is the broadest and most abstract of the external factors. Culture refers to the complexity of learning meanings, values, norms, and customs shared by members of a society. Cultural norms are relatively stable over time, so culture has a major effect on consumer behaviour. Research studies have consistently shown that culture influences almost every aspect of purchasing: it affects basic psychological domains such as self-identity and motivation, the way that information is processed, and the way that advertising messages are interpreted.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Marketers interested in global expansion are especially interested in understanding cross-cultural differences in purchasing and consumption. For instance, Ferrari, one of the world's top brands found that Chinese consumers are very different from their Western counterparts. Whereas consumers in the US, UK and Australia expect to wait 12 months for a custom-made Ferrari, prospective Chinese buyers want to drive the vehicle off the showroom floor. China is an ‘instant-gratification market’. Buyers see their friends riding around in a luxury car and want to have the same as quickly as possible. To meet the growing demand for luxury goods, Ferrari and other luxury car makers have been forced to modify their production processes for Asian markets.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Subcultures may be based on age, geographic, religious, racial, and ethnic differences. More often, however, a subculture occurs when people with shared interests form a loose-knit group with a distinctive identity (sometimes called "consumer tribes"). Members of subcultures are self-selected, and signal their membership status by adopting symbols, rituals, or behaviours that are widely understood by other members of the tribe (e.g. a dress code, hairstyle or even a unique way of speaking). For example, within youth culture it is possible to identify a number of sub-groups with common interests such as skaters and bladers, surfers, ravers, punks, skin-heads, Goths, homies, and others. Generally known as communities, as they create a sense of belonging to something important.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: A different type of subculture is a "consumption subculture" which is based on a shared commitment to a common brand or product. In other words, consumption subcultures cut across demographic, geographic, and social boundaries. The most well-known example of a consumption subculture is that of Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners. Ethnographic researchers who have studied Harley riders believe that there are only two types of motor cyclists: Harley owners and the rest. Harley-Davidson has leveraged the values of this subculture by establishing the Harley Owners Group (HOG).


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Subcultures are important to marketers for several reasons. Firstly, given that subcultures can represent sizeable market segments which are profitable and influential, there are obvious advantages in developing and selling products and services that meet the needs of subculture members. Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, many new fads and fashions emerge spontaneously from within these tribal groups. Trend-spotters are accordingly interested in studying the lifestyles and activities of tribes in an effort to spot new trends before they go mainstream.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Social class refers to relatively homogenous divisions in a society, typically based on socio-economic variables such as educational attainment, income, and occupation. Social class can be very difficult to define and measure, however marketers around the world tend to use a conventional classification which divides any given population into five socio-economic quintiles (e.g. In Australia the groups AB, C, D, E and FG, where AB is the top socio-economic quintile, but in much of Asia the quintiles are labelled I, II, III, IV and V where I is the top quintile). In Australia, for example, the AB socio-economic group account for just 24% of the population, but control 50% of discretionary spending. The top quintiles (i.e. AB socio-economic segments) are of particular interest to marketers of luxury goods and services such as travel, dining-out, entertainment, luxury cars, investment or wealth management services, up-market consumer electronics, and designer labels (e.g. Louis Vuitton). However, middle-class consumers tend to consume more carefully in comparison and collect information to compare different producers in the same line. Those who are lower-class consumers tend to buy more on impulse in comparison to the wealthy class who purchases goods to maintain social status.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: A reference group is defined as "a group whose presumed perspectives or values are being used by an individual as the basis for his or her judgment, opinions, and actions". Reference groups are important because they are used to guide an individual's attitudes, beliefs and values. Insights into how consumers acquire a given value system can obtained from an understanding of group influence and group socialisation processes.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The literature identifies five broad types of reference group: primary, secondary, aspirational, dissociative and formal:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: "Opinion Leaders" can act like reference groups in that they exert considerable social influence because of their product knowledge, expertise and credibility. In the marketing literature, opinion leaders are also known as influencers, mavens, and even hubs. Opinion leaders are specific to a product category, so that an opinion leader for computers is not likely to be an opinion leader for fashion. Typically, opinion leaders have high levels of involvement with the product category, are heavy users of the category, and tend to be early adopters of new technologies within the category. Journalists, celebrities, and bloggers are good examples of an opinion leader due to their broad social networks and increased ability to influence people's decisions. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that bloggers may be emerging as a more important group of opinion leaders than celebrities.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In order to leverage the value of opinion leaders in marketing strategies, it is important to be able to identify the unique opinion leaders for each category or situation and this can be very challenging. Some techniques that can be used are through key informants, socio-metric techniques and self-questionnaires. More often, however, marketers use gut instinct to identify opinion leaders. For example, marketers of athletic shoes have been known to provide gym and aerobic instructors with free shoes in the hope that class members will adopt the same brand as the instructor. Marketers of cosmetics and skincare preparations regularly provide fashion editors with free samples in the hope that their products will be mentioned in fashion magazines.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Evidence shows that certain consumer purchasing behaviours rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as result of external and internal factors. Namely, behaviours such as compulsive buying, impulsive buying, panic buying, and revenge buying – where panic buying and revenge buying were most noticeable – proved as a coping strategy for alleviating consumers’ negative responses to the pandemic.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Panic buying occurs when consumers purchase more things than usual as a consequence of adverse feelings of fear, anxiety and uncertainty surrounding a crisis or disruptive event. Such purchases tend to be excessive in relation to the perceived threat. During the pandemic, panic buying of necessities, such as food and hygiene products, increased across the globe. Consider, in particular, that Australia faced an unprecedented spike in toilet paper sales, prompting comments from its Prime Minister. Panic buying – in response to an irrational fear of scarcity of products and heightened urgency to procure coveted items – provided a sense of control for consumers during the pandemic, notwithstanding a loss of control to the social, professional and health environments around them.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In addition to panic buying throughout the pandemic, revenge buying was apparent during periods when non-essential stores reopened after COVID-19-related lockdowns. Revenge buying was specifically observed in physical luxury retail stores. For example, it was reported that an Hermes store in Guangzhou, China, made US$2.7 million in the first day it opened after lockdown, where consumers' purchases ranged from leather goods, scarves and homewares to a diamond-studded Birkin bag, among other things.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The purchase of luxury products – where ‘luxury’ is defined as high quality, expensive and non-necessary – is associated with positive emotions, often to compensate for negative feelings. Namely, revenge buying of luxury products provided an emotional release and a sense of belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which people were frustrated and psychologically discomforted. Such purchases can be said to have achieved sensory gratification as well as problem avoidance for consumers.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: It is clear that consumers sought to obtain internal happiness through consumption as a response to external health crises and social distancing measures. Both panic buying and revenge buying were compensatory in nature and therapeutic in nature – an attempt for consumers to control an external situation that was out of their internal control, as well as provide comfort, security, and improvement of well-being.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Due to the environmental trends, people begin to shop online more to avoid physical stores and stay contactless. Customers will spend more on sportswear than on professional dressing in 2020, and technology products related to teleworking, such as Zoom, also have more consumers than before.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Kannan and Kulkarni also illustrate some phenomena led by the channel migration caused by Covid-19. The first phenomenon is that customers are more open-minded to trying new brands and products because of the limitation of online channels of certain brands; the second phenomenon is that the long time pandemic restrictions make customers who use online channels as substitutes for their offline purchases initially now those customers have learned how to effectively use online channels for their daily lives.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: A number of theorists have argued that certain fundamental decision-making styles can be identified. A decision-making style is defined as a "mental orientation characterising a consumer's approach to making choices." Sproles and Kendall (1986) developed a consumer style inventory (CSI) consisting of eight factors, such as price-sensitivity, quality-consciousness, brand-consciousness, novelty-seeking, fashion-consciousness, and habit. Based on these factors, the authors developed a typology of eight distinct decision-making styles:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) has been extensively tested and retested in a wide variety of countries and purchasing contexts. Many empirical studies have observed cross-cultural variations in decision styles, leading to numerous adaptations or modifications of the CSI scale for use in specific countries. Consumer decision styles are important for marketers because they describe behaviours that are relatively stable over time and are therefore useful for market segmentation.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: In addition to understanding the purchasing decision, marketers are interested in a number of different aspects of consumer behaviour that occur before, during, and after making a purchase choice. Areas of particular interest include risk perception and risk reduction activities, brand switching, channel switching, brand loyalty, customer citizenship behaviours, and post purchase behavioural intentions and behaviours including brand advocacy, referrals, word of mouth activity etc.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The consumer's perceptions of risk are a major consideration in the pre-purchase stage of the purchasing decision. Perceived risk is defined as "the consumer's perceptions of the uncertainty and adverse consequences of engaging in an activity". Risk consists of two dimensions: "consequences" which refer to the degree of importance or the severity of an outcome and "uncertainty" which is the consumer's subjective assessment of the likelihood of occurrence. For example, many tourists are fearful of air travel because, although the probability of being involved in an airline accident is very low, the consequences are potentially dire.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The marketing literature identifies many different types of risk, of which five are the most frequently cited:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: If a consumer perceives a purchase to be risky, they will engage in strategies to reduce the perceived risk until it is within their tolerance levels or, if they are unable to do so, withdraw from the purchase. Thus, the consumer's perceptions of risk drive information search activities.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Services marketers have argued that risk perception is higher for services because they lack the search attributes of products (i.e. tangible properties that can be inspected prior to consumption). In terms of risk perception, marketers and economists identify three broad classes of purchase: search goods, experience goods, and credence goods with implications for consumer evaluation processes. Search goods, which include most tangible products, possess tangible characteristics that allow consumers to evaluate quality prior to purchase and consumption. Experience goods, such as restaurants and clubs, can only be evaluated with certainty after purchase or consumption. In the case of credence goods, such as many professional services, the consumer finds it difficult to fully appreciate the quality of the goods even after purchase and consumption has occurred. Difficulties evaluating quality after consumption may arise because the cost of obtaining information is prohibitive, or because the consumer lacks the requisite skills and knowledge to undertake such evaluations. These goods are called credence products because the consumer's quality evaluations depend entirely on the trust given to the product manufacturer or service provider.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Within consumer behaviour, a particular area of interest is the study of how innovative new products, services, ideas, or technologies spread through groups. Insights about how innovations are diffused (i.e., spread) through populations can assist marketers to speed up the new product adoption process and fine-tune the marketing program at different stages of the diffusion process. In addition, diffusion models provide benchmarks against which new product introductions can be tracked.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: A sizeable body of literature has been devoted to the diffusion of innovation. Research studies tend to fall into two broad categories: general diffusion research which is an approach that seeks to understand the general process of diffusion and applied diffusion research which consists of studies that describe the diffusion of specific products at particular moments in time or within given social communities. Collectively these studies suggest a certain regularity in the adoption process; initially few members adopt the innovation but over time successive, overlapping waves of people begin to adopt the innovation. This pattern contributes to a generalised S-shaped curve, as shown in the figure at right. However, the exact shape and timing of curves varies in different product markets such that some innovations are diffused relatively quickly, while others can take many years to achieve broad market acceptance.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The diffusion model developed by Everett Rogers is widely used in consumer marketing because it segments consumers into five groups, based on their rate of new product adoption. Rogers defines the diffusion of innovation as the process by which that innovation is "communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system." Thus the diffusion process has a number of elements, the innovation, the communication channels, time and the social system. An innovation is any new idea, object or process that is perceived as new by members of the social system. Communication channels are the means by which information about the innovation is transmitted to members of the social system and may include mass media, digital media and personal communications between members of the social system. Time refers to the rate at which the innovation is picked up by the members of the social system.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: A number of factors contribute to the rate at which innovations are diffused through a social community.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Innovations with some or all of these factors are more likely to be adopted quickly. Accordingly, marketing communications may stress the innovation's relative benefits over other solutions to the consumer's problem. Marketing messages may also focus on compatibility and observability. Marketers can also facilitate adoption by offering limited scale trial (e.g. samples, test drives, sale on approval) enabling consumers to develop and understanding of the innovation and how it is used prior to purchase.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Studies have shown that the diffusion rate for many new technologies is speeding up. The figure in the "Household Penetration of Selected Communications Technologies" report illustrates U.S. household penetration rates of selected communications technologies, measured as a percentage of all households. The slope of the curve becomes steeper with each successive innovation indicating a more rapid diffusion rate. For example, it took decades for the telephone to achieve 50 percent penetration rates beginning in around 1900, but it took less than five years for cellphones to achieve the same penetration rates. In order to explain the increasing pace of adoption, some have pointed to supply-side issues such as reduced barriers to entry and lower costs of innovation, while others have argued that consumers drive adoption rates because they place a high value on the convenience of new innovations.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Brand-switching occurs when a consumer chooses to purchase a different brand from their regular or customary brand. Consumers switch brands for a variety of reasons including that the store did not have the regular brand or the consumer's desire for variety or novelty in brand choice. In the fast moving consumer goods market (FMCG), the incidence of switching is relatively high. A great deal of marketing activity is targeted at brand-switchers. Rossiter and Bellman have proposed a classification of consumers based on brand-loyalty/switching behaviour:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Marketers are particularly interested in understanding the factors that lead to brand-switching. A global, large sample survey carried out by Nielsen shows that four in 10 shoppers (41%) said that getting a better price would encourage them to switch brands (or service provider/retailer), 26% said quality was an incentive to switch, 15% looked for a better service agreement and 8% said that improved features are a switching incentive. However, cross-cultural differences were observed among respondents. Price was the major switch incentive for more than half of North Americans (61%) and Europeans (54%) but price and quality held equal sway in Asia-Pacific and Middle East/Africa, with roughly one-third of respondents each in both regions reporting that both price and quality were the major incentives to switching.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: The concept of "switching costs" (also known as switching barriers) is pertinent to the understanding of brand switching. Switching costs refer to the costs incurred by a consumer when they switch from one supplier to another (or from one brand to another). Although switching costs are often monetary, the concept can also refer to psychological costs such as time, effort, and inconvenience incurred as a result of switching. When switching costs are relatively low, as in the case of many fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), the incidence of brand switching tends to be higher. An example of switching that includes both monetary and psychological costs is when Android or Apple users wish to switch to a different platform, they would need to sacrifice their data, including purchased music tracks, apps, or media and may also need to learn new routines to become an efficient user.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Channel-switching (not to be confused with zapping or channel surfing on TV) is the action of consumers switching to a different purchasing environment (or distribution channel) to purchase goods, such as switching from brick-and-mortar stores to the internet. A major reason for this channel switching behaviour is the convenience that online shopping provides for consumers. Consumers can shop online at any hour of the day, without having to drive, travel or walk to a physical store, and browse for as little or as much time as they please. The additional lure of ‘online only’ deals and discounts helps enforce a consumer's preference to shop online. Other factors for this shift are the globalization of markets, the advent of category killers (such as Officeworks and Kids 'R Us) as well as changes in the legal regulatory environment. For instance, in Australia and New Zealand, following a relaxation of laws prohibiting supermarkets from selling therapeutic goods, consumers are gradually switching away from pharmacies and towards supermarkets for the purchase of minor analgesics, cough and cold preparations and complementary medicines such as vitamins and herbal remedies.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: For the consumer, channel switching offers a more diverse shopping experience. However, marketers need to be alert to channel switching because of its potential to erode market share. Evidence of channel switching can suggest that disruptive forces are at play, and that consumer behaviour is undergoing fundamental changes. A consumer may be prompted to switch channels when the product or service can be found cheaper, when superior models become available, when a wider range is offered, or simply because it is more convenient to shop through a different channel (e.g. online or one-stop shopping). As a hedge against market share losses due to switching behaviour, some retailers engage in multi-channel retailing.


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Impulse purchases are unplanned purchases. Impulse buying can be defined as “a sudden and powerful urge to buy immediately” and occurs when a consumer purchases an item which they had no intention of purchasing prior to entering the store. Impulse buying can be influenced by external stimuli such as store characteristics and sale promotions, internal stimuli such as enjoyment and self-identity, situational and product related factors such as time and money available, and demographic and socio-cultural factors such as gender, age, and education. Stern introduced the four broad classifications of impulse buying including pure impulse buying, reminded impulse buying, suggestion impulse buying, and planned impulse buying:


title: Consumer behaviour

text: Recent research carried out by Nielsen International suggests that about 72 percent of FMCG purchases are planned, but that 28 percent of supermarket purchases are unplanned or impulse purchases. The top unplanned purchases in the food category are candy (lollies), chocolate, cookies (biscuits), frozen desserts, and snacks and the top unplanned purchases in the non-food category are cosmetics, air-fresheners, toothbrushes, hand-soaps, and hand/body lotions. This explains why supermarkets place these types of products at the front of the store or near the checkout where the consumer spends more time and is more likely to notice them and therefore more likely to pop them into the shopping basket. Retailers use insights from this type of research to design stores in ways that maximise opportunities for impulse-buying.