Identifying and prioritizing factors affecting the behavior of buyers of road construction machinery in Tehran construction projects

Master's thesis (or doctoral dissertation) field:

Executive Management (MA)

Tension: Strategy

Abstract

Consumer behavior is one of the most important marketing chapters that should be investigated. As long as an economic enterprise is not able to identify how consumer behavior is formed, it cannot determine its marketing plans. Therefore, developing a company's marketing strategies is aimed at understanding consumer behavior. Therefore, in today's highly competitive market, companies that know the process of how consumers behave better and more accurately and respond to the needs of customers in the best way will be successful. Considering that the researcher has been working in the machinery and equipment department of major construction companies of the country for several years, during these years the question has always been raised for him: what factors play a role in the purchase decision process? and how much is the impact of each of these factors? Interest and curiosity to find answers to these questions led the researcher to choose the identification and prioritization of factors affecting the behavior of buyers of heavy road construction machinery in Tehran projects as the subject of his master's thesis. It helped both the companies that supply heavy road construction machinery and the managers of the construction industry to know as many customers as possible in this market. In this research, after conducting exploratory research, it was determined that 4 factors of quality, price, after-sales service and brand are the most important to the managers of heavy road construction machinery. Therefore, after studying several models about consumer behavior, Professor Kuada's industrial buyer behavior model was finally chosen due to more emphasis on these factors. The 4 hypotheses proposed in this research are: 1) The quality factor has the greatest impact on the behavior of buyers of heavy road construction machinery. 2) The price factor has a greater impact on the behavior of buyers of heavy road construction machinery compared to the after-sales service and brand factors. 3) The after-sales service factor has a more effective role in the behavior of the buyers of heavy road construction machinery than the brand factor alone. 4) The brand factor has the least impact on the behavior of the buyers of heavy road construction machinery. The research community also includes all managers of heavy machinery in the city of Tehran who have purchased heavy machinery for their companies, and their number is 283. 64 of these managers were selected as samples of this research through simple random sampling. The data collection tool in this research was a questionnaire. Questionnaire No. 1 was distributed among the research sample in order to collect data to determine the effect of the independent research variables on buyers' behavior. The results of the analysis of these data indicated that all 4 factors are effective on buyers' behavior with a probability of 99%. Questionnaire number 2 was also distributed among the sample in order to collect data to test the research hypotheses. The results of the analysis of this data, which was carried out by the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, indicated that the factors of quality, after-sales service, price and brand are respectively the most important in the eyes of buyers. In this way, hypotheses 1 and 4 of this research were confirmed and hypotheses 2 and 3 were rejected. Heavy road construction equipment and construction industry managers who want to conduct similar research in the future. Chapter 1 Research Overview 1-1 Introduction Due to the increasing expansion of the city of Tehran and the increase in urban travel, the heavy traffic of Tehran city causes a lot of time loss for the citizens of this metropolis, which causes deep negative effects in various dimensions. For this reason, the officials of the capital municipality have allocated a large budget to the projects of the city of Tehran, which will be spent on the construction of tunnels, bridges, highways, as well as the expansion of the subway network.

Many construction companies that operate in this field need various road construction machines such as T.B.M. machines, road headers, cranes, loaders, excavators, etc. It should be purchased at the beginning of the project and at the stage of equipping the workshop according to the type of construction operation. Therefore, day by day, the number of companies that sell these machines, which are mainly importers of foreign machines, and the competition between them increases.Of course, the more accurate and complete the knowledge, the suppliers can formulate a more effective strategy for the marketing department. The success of any business in today's highly competitive market depends on several factors. Goods and services markets have changed and become complicated, customers' needs have changed and their expectations have increased. So that in order to remain standing in this field, more attention should be paid to the factors that influence the purchase decision of customers. This is why today consumer buying behavior is always considered as one of the most important topics in marketing and deep studies have been done in this field for several decades. Even in industrial markets, where the need for goods and services has always been homogeneous compared to consumer markets, sometimes buyers have diverse preferences and show purchasing behavior that is less predictable.

In industrial marketing, success also begins with understanding how consumers behave. Industrial marketing, sometimes known as business marketing [1], is a field of marketing in which organizational users [2] purchase products and services for production operations in their organization. Unfortunately, this type of marketing has received less attention due to its industrial and mechanical nature (Hass, 1989, 3).

According to the extensive efforts that are being made today to promote and expand the attitude of customer orientation by researchers, experts and managers of commercial organizations, it can be seen that now customer satisfaction and loyalty is considered as one of the most important factors in determining the success of organizations in terms of business and profitability, so in order to achieve commercial progress, behavior evaluation, decision process Customer perception of products and services provided by commercial institutions has become a vital issue.

Consumer behavior includes various psychological and social processes that include before and after purchasing and consumption activities. Behind every purchasing action lies an important decision-making process that needs to be explored. The steps a buyer goes through to decide what kind of products or services to buy are called the buying decision process. This process includes 5 main stages, which are: problem diagnosis, information search, evaluation of solutions, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior. Various factors such as: motivation, culture, attitude and perception. can affect the behavior of consumers and the decision-making process of buyers, these factors are more important in consumer markets where buyers make emotional decisions (Amirshahi and Janani, 2015, 2), but in industrial markets where buyers make rational decisions, attention to mixed marketing factors can be relatively more important (Arjen, 2002, 29).

Companies in the marketing planning process should as much as they can Consider the factors affecting consumer behavior. All buyers are affected by these factors, but the extent and manner of these factors' effect on them is different. Regarding the factors and elements of marketing mix in the behavior of buyers of industrial products, the type of product and its features along with the price and pricing features are important. In the meantime, due to the close relationship between sellers and buyers, the role of distribution channels is weak and in the methods of promoting sales, it relies more on personal selling.

In this research, an attempt is made to identify the factors that influence the behavior of buyers of heavy road construction machinery and by ranking these factors, it helped both the supplier companies in formulating their marketing strategies and the contractor companies implementing construction projects so that they can meet their needs with a better and more accurate understanding.

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1-2- Statement of the problem

Knowing the behavior of consumers and knowing how and why the buying behavior of customers in the market of road construction machinery is a subject that, despite its importance and sensitivity, has not received much attention. It is safe to say that today, a huge part of the capital of the construction sector in countries is spent on the purchase and maintenance of machinery, but unfortunately, in our country, due to the lack of proper understanding of the suppliers of machinery to the needs and demands of customers and the identification of factors that affect how contracting companies purchase, many machinery purchases have low productivity.