2.

4 Student Decision-making Process

Naturally when people engages in decision making, they adhere to different types of decision
making behaviour. Consumers expend time and effort in making their decisions, but their method
will vary depending on the individual and the current environment.

Figure 1 - Five-Stage Model of the Consumer Buying Process

The five-stage process outlined in figure 1 (Kotler, 2000) forms the basis for modelling consumer
buying behaviour. It starts with the consumer identifying a problem and ends with the consumer
purchasing the item or service followed by a post-purchase evaluation. This model can be applied to
students seeking to purchase higher education services (Chapman, 1986). The intangible nature of
services compared to physical products would result in a scarcity of reliable information regarding
the quality of the service. Especially as educational services is not something that can be easily
previewed or test-driven by prospective students. Naturally, they would seek to acquire more
information in the relevant areas to aid in making the most optimal purchasing decision. Initial
source of information that they would trust the most would come from close acquintances or figures
of authority such as high school teachers, high school guidance-counselors, family members and
relatives, family friends, college/university alumni, and acquaintances attending particular
colleges/university (Chapman, 1986). The acquisition of information through word-of-mouth as a
strategy to mitigate risks when it comes to selecting the most optimal choice of higher educations,
an act which requires a great deal of involvements from the students in their role as consumers
(Chua, 2004).
In the consummer decision model espoused by Blackwell, Miniard and Engel (2008), there are
different degrees with which the consumer employs the decision making process. A person
partaking in only limited decision making may not engage the whole process, while a person
engaging in extensive problem solving will usually apply each phase to the maximum. For example,
a consumer (student) engaged in extensive problem solving will exhaustively search for an appraise
every singe 'brand' of colleges and universities accessible. The first box in figure 2 shows the total
set of existing choices available to consumers. The individual consumer will only know a subset of
these brands (awareness set). Initially, they will form a consideration set consisting of brands that
meets their initial buying criteria. As the consumer gathers more information, they weed out
unsuitable brands, leaving only strong contenders (choice set) and then apply a number of decision
rules to make a selection from the choice set (Kotler, 2000). A lack of prior knowledge of the
'products' will will cause the consumer to spend a lot of time and energy obtaining the relevant
information.

Figure 2 - Successive Sets Involved in Consumer Decision Making

References

Blackwell, R. D., Miniard, P., & Engel, J. (2008). Consumer behaviour, (International
student edition). Thomson higher education.
Chapman, R. G. (1986). Toward a theory of college selection: A model of college search and
choice behavior. Advances in Consumer Research, 13(1), 246-250.
Chua, C. (2004, July). Perception of quality in higher education. In Proceedings of the
Australian universities quality forum (pp. 181-187). Melbourne: AUQA Occasional
Publication.
Kotler, P. (2000). Marketing management: The millennium edition (pp. 87-103). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.