Comportement du consommateur : pourquoi des étudiants en échange Erasmus choisissent d'étudier à Paisley ?

Nowadays, more and more students decide to go and study abroad in order to enhance their language abilities and to discover new cultures and lifestyles.
As a French student who lived and studied in paisley for a year, the author is aware that going abroad to study is an important and difficult decision to make and that one should think about it very carefully before making a choice. In Marketing, this kind of decision takes part in what is called the consumer behaviour which can be defined as "the decision process and physical activity individuals engage in when evaluating, acquiring, using or disposing of goods or services" (Lawson et al., 1996). Thanks to this process, it is possible to draw on models from economics, psychology, sociology or even anthropology.

It is important to know that consumer behaviour can be influenced by different variables such as external environmental ones (cultural and sub-cultural influences, social class influences, family and personal influences, etc) but also individual determinants that establish how consumers proceed through the decision process (information processing, personality, attitudes, motivation, etc).

The choice was to illustrate this marketing theory thanks to an example: the decision to go and study in the University of the West of Scotland, which is a high-involvement "product". The aim will be to explain how such a choice is made thanks to the decision-making process, and to take students' culture into account, which is one of the major variables in the decision-making process.

However, to do so it is first needed to define the market of choice and to go through its past and current trends.
First of all, as this is a worldwide market it was chosen to concentrate the study on European students, more precisely those who are part of the erasmus programme. Indeed, this programme is the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students and is "the European Commission's educational programme for Higher Education students".
(http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/socrates/erasmus/what_en.html).
In other words, its aim is to help students to study abroad knowing that their diploma and qualifications will be valid and recognised in their home country. Not only do they help them but they also provide them with financial help thanks to the erasmus grant.

This programme is therefore the most important one of its kind in the European Union and hence the information found about it is reliable.
In order to understand why studying in paisley attracts more and more students, it is interesting to see which determining aspects play a role in their individual decision-making process and to take into account their culture.