5. Marketing and the nature of customer perceptions

5.1 Who is the customer, the buyer, the user?

• The concepts of customer and consumer cover a series of exchanges of different natures: those who buy to resell, those who buy to offer, those who buy by delegation, those who buy under prescription, those who buy in groups, the family for example, and finally the situation that often serves as a summary of all the others: those who buy themselves and for themselves.

Of course, each of these buying postures presupposes an appropriate promotional system, even if the product sometimes involves a combination of these types of exchanges. Beyond this, the consumer manifests an attitude towards the purchasing situation, the components of which are linked to cognitive dimensions (what he...