Reading week starts early...

The family life cycle...it's a beautiful thing isn't it? Every member of every family has a role to play when it comes to making decisions about a potential purchase. It's normally the children's role to cry and moan until they get their own way...doesn't always work though (I never did get that Mr Frosty...I had a deprived childhood). The father will normally complain about the price then go and find a number of cheaper alternatives that according to them "do exactly the same job"...and the mother will normally just try to play peacemaker in the whole situation.

In all seriousness there are a number of decisions in modern day life that are made every day by families across the world, but in general they fall into defined categories which determines who makes the final decision.

For instance, in most families any purchases of audio, visual, electrical goods and DIY products will be made by the man of the house...this is because men get excited about gadgets, gizmos, megapixels, blu-rays and a whole host of other exotically named things. Men tend to think that this is our domain, it's a man's job to pick mens things and so on and so forth. In reality, we're not quite as clued up as we like to think and will probably end up breaking the damn thing before we've used it as we haven't read the instruction manual.

Women on the other hand have control over a broad range of purchases. They usually do the weekly shop, because they know what needs to be restocked in the cupboards and what food, toiletries and sundies we will need for the week ahead. As a man I have absolutely no problem with this...the only time I ever want to enter Tesco is if I'm picking up alcohol.

Oddly enough, according to some sources women actually have the final say over their man's choice of clothes too. Let me clarify right now that no woman will ever pick my clothes for me...but I am more than happy for a woman to pay for them if anyone wants to put themself forward?

One factor to take into consideration is that with this whole credit crunch malarkey going on right now, many families choices may have been narrowed slightly. Whilst before the credit crunch the person with the most technical know how and the person who would be the main user (or gain the most satisfaction from the product) may have had more of a say in purchases, in the current climate many families will be basing their purchases mainly on price with the person who is actually paying the bill having the final say.

Information about the family decision making process when purchasing products is an important tool for marketers. If we can work out who it is who actually has the final say on purchases we can make sure that our advertisements are aimed at that particular person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svna4en9JKg

The clip above shows an example of what I've been banging on about. The advertisement is clearly aimed at men...Wickes is a shop that will mainly cater for men as DIY products are not that interesting for most women. So knowing that men are their target audience, the makers of the advert have used football (another predominantly male hobby) to show off their products. Throw in a slice of humour and the result is an increase in male footfall in Wickes' stores before Corrie comes back on from the ad break!