Information Behaviors of Modern Consumers: The Case of Polish Food Market

The latest technological and social changes as well as overwhelming flow of various types of information to consumers have exerted a major impact on their activity regarding dealing with marketing messages. They perform different roles in the marketing communication process, as they are recipients, opinion leaders, brokers, content selectors, cocreators, and senders. However, they still need to select valuable information from the communication noise in order to make purchase decisions, though. The main objective of this chapter is to analyze the information behaviors of modern consumers. This study presents the major factors influencing consumers’ behaviors in case of collecting and dealing with marketing information and shows its implications for the organizations’ marketing communication activities. Four hundred and eighty-one structured direct interviews were conducted in Poland with persons responsible for food purchases in households. Correlations and cluster analyses were executed. On the basis of the results consumers’ segmentation in relation to information gathering and attaching importance to opinions acquired while taking decisions on the purchase of food was done. The classification into five clusters was selected, named: Hesitant seekers (22% of all respondents), Independent seekers (15.8%), Observers (21.8%), Information relativists (22.1%), and Skeptics relying on others (18.3%). The description of main characteristics was done for each segment.