What/who influence you the most ?

The measure of success has been marked with status symbols of anything and everything that can be slapped with a label such as clothing, cars and electronics . Many people have developed a need to identify with brand image and conform to the influence of advertisers in order to gain the acceptance of their mass peer audience.

The desire to be accepted and belong to a group is human need. Social psychologists have conducted numerous experiments through various forms of social influence, groups can change their members’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior. According to Leon Mann, conformity means ‘yielding to group pressures’. People are not alone in the world because they belong to many groups and everyone expects members of these groups to behave in certain ways . If an individual don’t confirm and behave appropriately he/she are likely to be rejected by the group. Lessing states “most people cannot stand being alone... but what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us”  .

Conformity can be defined as adjusting one's behavior or thinking to match those of other people or a group standard. There are lots of reasons why people conform, including the desire/need to fit in or be accepted by others and maintaining order in ones life.

Kelman (1958) suggests 3 types of conformity:

• Compliance- A change in behaviour without a change in opinion (going along with the group).
• Internalisation- A change in behaviour and opinion. 'True Conformity'.
• Identification- Adopting the group's views because value group membership. Often temporary.

People are bombarded everyday with millions of advertisements and product suggestions. All of these efforts attempt to convince the individual to buy a particular product because it will bring some satisfaction to their life. The task of the marketer is to establish a marketing strategy that will be successful in this goal. Many of the ads on television and in magazines place emphasis on beautiful people and fun settings and associate them with the benefits that one product offers over another.

According to Lascu and Zinkhan (1999) the majority of marketing strategies focus on showing beautiful and happy people using certain products, therefore, people are  to assume that they should use those products in order to be more like the beautiful, happy people. 

Lascu and Zinkhan discussed the importance of conformity by noting that if this phenomena is true in a large target market, marketers can search for more ways to mass market these ideas of interpersonal peer influences and increase the success of their product dramatically. They also noted that it appeared a conformity approach had less effect on older more educated adults such as professionals and that different marketing approaches may need to be used with those target markets. 

The reasons for the effectiveness of conformity on purchasing decisions are not certain. Once a person has conformed to group pressure and agreed that they are interested in a product, they will often agree to purchase that product. According to Spangenberg, Sprott, Grohmann, and Smith (2003) once a person stated they would purchase a product they were extremely likely to do so.

It has long been recognized that the pleasure of consuming a good may be affected by the consumption choice of other consumers. In some cases, social pressures may lead to conformity. Consumers very often base purchases more on the trends of their peer group or the guidance of illusory advertising and less on information and research.During the decision-making process, consumers use rational thinking.There can be factors, such as  the  peers pressure that cause consumers to abbreviate the decision-making process to make purchase decisions and therefore exhibit irrationalconsumption behavior, called "impulse buying" (Mowen and Minor, 1998).

Peer pressure can be defined as the pressure exerted on a person by a group of people the same age, same socio-cultural category or sharing the same interests to change their behavior, their morals or their attitudes towards different aspects in life just to be in line with the way other people in their peer group are.

Opinion leaders

In general is the member of a reference group who provides information about a specific sphere of interest to reference group participants seeking information.

Opinion leaders communicate messages to a primary group, influencing the attitudes and behavior change of their followers.

In marketing point of view opinion leaders have been identified as those who spread ideas and opinions across their social networks on a regular basis. The study identified three groups of opinion leaders :

• Hub Urbanites who share information via social media and instant messaging,
• Email Evangelists who share information via email and SMS, 
•  Offline Influencers who share information and news face to face or over the phone.