When talking about a small business for sale, it is very important to understand the buyer and to create a customer through this understanding. This is called a buyer behavior study. The time and effort spent on this relatively new discipline have been of enormous magnitude. And every buyer-study has unfolded some new dimension of this discipline. The subject has been approached and analyzed from different angles and under different premises.

What motivates the buyer? What induces him to buy? Why does he buy a specific brand from a particular shop? Why does he shift his preferences from one shop to another or from one brand to another? How does he react to a new product introduced in the market or a piece of information addressed to him? What are the stages he travels through before he makes the decision to buy? These are some of the questions that are of perennial interest. It is around these questions that the product and promotion strategies ultimately revolve.

It needs to be emphasized at the very outset that there is no unified, well-defined, tested and universally established theory of buyer behavior. What we have today are certain ideas on buyer behavior. Some of these ideas have taken their cue from economics, others from psychology, and yet others have drawn cues from several of the social sciences simultaneously. Business firms and professional researchers have studied the subject extensively, contributing a large assortment of information on buyer behavior. However, a universally accepted theory of the subject has yet to emerge.

The buyer is a riddle. He is a highly complex entity. His needs and desires are innumerable, and they vary from security needs to aesthetic needs. These needs and desires are often at different stages of emergence and actualization. Some are latent, some manifest, and others highly dominant. The buyer has his own ways and means of meeting these needs. Some of these needs are within his means; he can easily meet them. Some others may be beyond realization.