What is the Consumer Decision-Making Process?

The steps in the consumer decision-making process are as follows:

• Need Recognition – This is when a person decides that they need something. It could be a product or change of situation. 
• Information Search – This is where we go looking for a solution. It can also be seen as trying to understand the options that will meet or satisfy our needs. 
• Evaluation of Alternatives – Once we have some idea about the options available to us, we need to decide which one is best. This can take a long time in some instances, depending up how familiar is the situation. It can be driven my emotion as well as logic. 
• Purchase – The next step is to make the purchase, which is pretty straightforward.
• Post-Purchase Evaluation – The final step is the post-purchase evaluation. This is when we’ve made a purchase we decide whether it was a good purchase. We ask, did that product meet our needs effectively? From there, we can either engage in some really positive behaviors like word of mouth or we can decide that that was a bad decision and we can choose that we will never make that decision again. These are just examples of the kinds of things that come out of post-purchase evaluation.