•Chapter 1 - Consumers Rule

•Who is a consumer?

“Person who identifies a need or desire, makes a purchase, and then disposes of the product.”

•What is Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior: the study of the processes involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, or
dispose of products, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires.

•What is Need? and What is Want?

Need- something you have to have for your survival. E.g. water, food, shelter, clothes, basic healthcare

Want - something you would like to have. E.g. a big house, branded clothes, fancy foods, luxurious items

•Who is marketer?

A person whose duties include the identification of the goods and services desired by a set of consumers, as well as
the marketing of those goods and services on behalf of a company.

•Consumer Behavior is a “Process”

The expanded view emphasize the entire consumption process, which includes:

1) pre-purchase issues

2) purchase issues

3) post purchase issues

Stages in the Consumption Process

•Actors in Consumer Behavior

We think a consumer identifies a need or desire, makes a purchase, and disposes of the product during the three
stages in the consumption process.

However, Different people play a different role in sequence of purchasing process

Actors in Consumer Behavior

Purchaser versus user versus influencer

Influenced purchase decision by peer groups

Exchange - a transaction in which two or more organizations or people give and receive something of value.

Why managers, advertisers & other marketing professionals bother to learn about consumer behavior?

Consumers’ Impact on Marketing Strategy

•Understanding consumer behavior is good business

•Consumer response helps to ensure that product continues to appeal to its core market

•Knowledge and data about customers Help define the market and Identify threats/ opportunities to a brand

e.g. Sony Walkman replaced by Apple IPod

•Segmenting Consumers

•Market segmentation - Targeting a brand only to specific groups of consumers rather than to everybody

•Consumer’s specific needs or desires satisfaction rewards brand with years of Brand Loyalty

•Change in life situation or self-concept can only break this bond.

•Segmenting Consumers
•Heavy Users: defining market segments when companies identify their most faithful customers
•(80/20 rule) - 20% of users account for 80% of sales Also known as Pareto principle

•Demographics - statistics that measure observable aspects of a population

•Age
•Gender
•Family structure
•Social class/income
•Race/ethnicity
•Geography

•Psychographics – lifestyles varies even if they share demographics

•The way we feel about ourselves •The things we value

•The things we do in our spare time •How we choose to spend our spare time
•Tapping into Consumer Lifestyles

•Philosophy of Relationship Marketing - Marketers realize that a key to success is building relationships between
brands and customers

•Relationship marketing: interact with customers regularly to maintain a bond. E.g. Mc Donalds, Food Panda

•Database marketing: tracking specific consumers’ buying habits and crafting products and messages. E.g. Walmart,
Sapphire, Alfatah

•Does marketer replicate life, or vice versa?

•Marketing’s Impact on Consumers

•Marketers significantly influence the world and the information we learn! •Marketing stimuli surround and compete for
our attention and persuade to buy
•Popular Culture

Popular culture: Produced, liked & consumed by mass audience, also impacts our cultural events

•Music •Movies •Sports •Books •Celebrities •Entertainment

•Consumer-Generated Content

•People voice their opinions about products, brands, and companies on blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites

•People often buy products not for what they do, but for what they mean!

•What do brands do?

Brands…
•…Convey image/personality
•…Define our place in modern society
•…Help us to form bonds with others who share similar preferences

•E.g. Nike

•Motivation

Motivation refers to the processes that lead people to behave as they do

•It occurs when a need is aroused that the consumer wishes to satisfy. The desired end state is consumers goal

•Motivation & Drive Theory

The need creates a sense of tension that drives the consumer to reduce or eliminate it. The degree of arousal is called
Drive. Drive theory focuses on biological needs that produce unpleasant state of arousal like hunger.

Types of Needs

Need can be:

1.Utilitarian– desire to achieve some functional and practical benefits

2.Hedonic – an experiential need, involving emotional responses or fantasies

•Classifying Consumer Needs

Three of the most commonly discussed needs include:

•Need for affiliation

•Need for power

•Need for uniqueness

•Classifying Consumer Needs

●​ Need for power relates to our desire to have a mastery over our environment and surroundings. E.g. head
girl/boy
●​ Need for uniqueness relates to our desire to be distinctive. E.g. customized clothes

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

•Lower level needs - physiological and safety

•Upper level needs - belonging and ego

•Highest level need - self-fulfillment

Needs met on multiple levels

Gardening can satisfy the need for:

•Physical activity •Feel safe eating organic food •Share the activity with others

•Feel competent as a gardener •Sense of peace

The Meaning of Consumption

•People use products to reflect who they are and what’s important to them

•Role theory explains that people play a variety of roles in life.

•They may buy specific products to fit the roles. E.g. mother, daughter, wife

Brand Relationship Types

People also develop relationships with brands.

1) Self-concept attachment - product helps to establish the user’s identity e.g. iPhone

2) Nostalgic attachment - product serves as a link to a past self e.g. baby powder

3) Interdependence - product being a part of the user’s daily routine e.g. coffee
4) Love - product elicits emotional bonds of warmth, passion, or other strong emotion. e.g. dairymilk

The Global Consumer

•Global Consumer Culture (by-product of marketing strategies)

•Pressure to understand similarities and differences of customers in various countries

Technology and Culture

•Access to the Internet is incredibly influential for consumer behavior.

•Additional channel of distribution B2C e-commerce and C2C e-commerce

Virtual Consumption

•Impact of the Web on consumer behavior

•24/7 shopping
•Instantaneous access to news
•Handheld devices & wireless communications

•For Review

1.Consumer behavior is a process.

2.Marketers need to understand the wants and needs of different consumer segments.

3.Our choices as consumers relate in powerful ways to the rest of our lives.

4.Our motivations to consume are complex and varied.

Chapter 2 - Decision Making

Learning Objective 1: What is a Problem?

Every consumer decision is a response to a problem.

Since some purchases decisions are more important than others, therefore the amount of effort we put in also differs.

Decision Making Process

The decision making process can be:

•Automatic, where we make quick judgments based on very little information

•A full time job where consumer make decisions thoughtfully and rationally and assign pros and cons of different
choices.

Decision Making Process

•Given the range of problems we all confront in our lives, it is difficult to apply same solution to all problems.

•According to researchers, decision makers actually posses a collection of strategies.

•In thought process we call it as a constructive processing: a processing is a conscious absorption of outside stimuli
that results either in knowledge gained or action taken.

•In some cases, consumers creates a mental budget

•It helps to estimate what we will consume over time so that we can regulate what we do in present. E.g. Dieter may
skip the tonight’s candy for the sake of tomorrow’s BBQ lunch

Three Types of Decision-Making

•The three types of consumer decision-making are:

1)Cognitive

2)Habitual

3)Affective

•Figure 2.1 Three Types of

Consumer Involvement:

•Involvement: is a person’s perceived importance of the object based on their inherent (intrinsic) needs, values or
interests.

•Object refers to a product or a brand, an advertisement or a purchase situation.

Involvement and Motivation

•Our motivation to attain a goal increases our desires to acquire the product or services that we believe will satisfy it.

•Involvement reflects our level of motivation to process information about a product or service we believe will help us
to solve a problem or reach a goal.

•Think of a person’s degree of involvement as a continuum (scale). E.g. it can range from absolute lack of interest to
obsession.

•Inertia describes the consumption at the low end of involvement where we make decisions out of habit because we
lack motivation to consider alternatives

•
Types of Involvement

1) Product involvement

•It’s a consumer’s level of interest in a particular product. The more closely marketers tie a brand to an individual,
higher the involvement they create.

•Product decisions are likely to be highly involving if the consumer believes there is perceived risk.

•Perceived risk is less of a problem for consumers who have a greater “risk capital”

•Five Types of Perceived Risk

2) Message involvement

•It refers to the influence media vehicles have on the consumers.

•Print is a high-involvement medium.

•Television is a low-involvement medium.

Boost Message Involvement Techniques

•Use novel stimuli - unusual cinematography, sudden silences or unexpected movement

•Use prominent stimuli to capture attention - loud music or fast action

•Celebrity endorsements

•Provide value to customers

•New media platforms to grab attention

•Create displays where the message is a form of entertainment

3) Situational Involvement

•It takes place at a store, website, or a location where people consume a product or service

•Can be increased by personalizing the messages shoppers receive at the time of purchase. E.g. Starbucks name on
cups

Decision-Making Process

•A cognitive purchase decision is the outcome of a series of stages that results in the selection of one product over
competing options.

•Traditionally approached decision-making from an information processing perspective

•Integrate old information with new, weigh the pluses and minuses of each alternative, and arrive at a satisfactory
decision

Steps in the Decision-Making Process

Consumer Decision Making

Stage 1: Problem Recognition

•Occurs when consumer sees difference between current state and ideal state
•Need recognition: quality in actual state declines; It can occur when a consumer’s state of being declines (which
then triggers a desire to return to normalcy)
•Opportunity recognition: ideal state moves upwards or when a consumer recognizes an ideal state he or she
wishes to achieve.

Stage 2: Information Search

Process by which we survey the environment for appropriate data to make a reasonable decision

•Prepurchase or ongoing search

•Internal or external search

•Online search and cybermediaries - Search engines have vast information available, cybermediaries help narrow
and filter them

•Intelligent agents - Sophisticated software programs that use collaborative filtering technologies to learn from past
user behavior in order to recommend new purchases.

Stage 3: Alternatives

Evoked Set: The alternatives a consumer knows about is the evoked set

Consideration Set: The ones actually considered make up the consideration set.

Knowledge Structures

•We cognitively represent information we have about products in knowledge structures.

•Knowledge structures are a set of beliefs and the way we organize these beliefs in our minds.

•Ensure consumers are categorizing product information correctly hence, important to marketers.

Strategic Implications of Product Categorization

•The process affects which products consumers will compare to our product and also the criteria they use to decide
which brand they like.

•Position a product: The success of a positioning strategy relies on the marketer’s ability to convince the consumer
to consider its product within a given category. E.g. Pepsi A.M

•Locate products in a store: Affects consumers’ expectations regarding the places they can locate a desired product
e.g. is rug furniture?, dog food in frozen food category

•Identify competitors: At superordinate level products compete for membership. Brands with strong association with
a category defines the criteria to evaluate all category members. e.g. Category Entertainment has ballet and bowling

•Create an exemplar product: Category exemplars tend to exert a uneven influence on how people think of the
category in general. e.g. Basil seeds fruit juice, pulpy juice

Alternatives Evaluation

•Evaluative criteria are the dimensions we use to judge the merits of competing options.

•Determinant attributes - features that we actually use to differentiate among our choices. E.g. Pepsi cola freshness
dates on cans

Decision Rules among Alternatives

•In extensive decision making we categorize decision rules as:

•compensatory (cognitive)

•non-compensatory (habitual or emotional decisions)

Compensatory Decision Rules

To effectively recommend a new decision criterion, a marketer should convey three pieces of information:

1) it should point out that there are significant differences among brands on the attribute.
2) it should supply the consumer with a decision making rule such as if…(deciding among competing brands),
then…(use the attribute as a criterion).

3) It should convey a rule that is consistent with how the person made the decision on previous occasions.

Non-compensatory Decision Rules

•It suggest that a product that is low on one attribute cannot compensate for that weakness with a strength on another
attribute. E.g. never heard of a brand or the color is gross

•Lexicographic rule: consumers select the brand that is the best on the most important attribute

•Elimination-by-aspects rule: the buyer also evaluates brands on the most important attribute

•The two above rules involve the processing by attribute

•Conjunctive rule: entails processing by brand

Stage 4 and Stage 5

•Step # 4: Product Choice

•Once we assemble and evaluate the options, a choice is made from among product choices.

•Step # 5: Post- Purchase Evaluation

•It closes the loop; occurs when we experience the product or service we selected and decide if it meets or exceeds
our expectations.

•It leads to consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction which plays an big role in our future buying decision.

Habitual Decision Making

•Consumers use “mental rules-of-thumb (heuristics)” or cues in the environment to make future decisions.

•Cues in the environment may make us more likely to react in certain ways. This is known as priming. (Music and
Wine)
•Subtle changes in a consumer’s environment can change behavior and this is known as a nudge.
•The default bias is where we are more likely to act upon with a requirement than to make the effort not to comply.
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts (consumers fall back on shortcuts to simplify the choices)

•We make some decisions on the basis of an emotional reaction rather than as the outcome of a rational thought
process.

•Positive Affect: consumer feelings can serve as a source of information when we weigh the pros and cons of a
decisions

•Negative Affect: primitive emotion of disgust evolved to protect consumer from contaminations.

•Disgust exerts a powerful effect on consumer judgments hence, advertisers use negative imagery to get their
message across.

For Review
1.The three categories of consumer decision-making are cognitive, habitual, and affective.
2.A cognitive purchase decision is the outcome of a series of stages that results in the selection of one product over
competing options.
3.We often fall back on well-learned “rules-of-thumb” to make decisions.
4.We make some decisions on the basis of an emotional reaction rather than as the outcome of a rational thought
process

Chapter 5 - Perception

Overflowing Sensations
●​ World is full of over flowing sensations.
●​ Our world is a masterpiece of colors, sounds, odors, tastes and textures.
●​ Consumers are never far from Advertisements, product packages, radio & TV commercials, billboards- all
clamoring for our attention.
Sensory Marketing Systems
●​ Sensory marketing means that companies pay extra attention to how our sensations affect our product
experiences.
●​ Marketers recognize that our senses help us to decide which products appeal to us.

Sensation
●​ Immediate response of our sensory receptors (a sensor which respond to stimuli)(eyes, ears, nose, mouth,
fingers)…to basic stimuli (causing a response)……such as light, color, sound, odor, and texture
Perception
●​ Perception - Perception is defined as the process by which an individual selects, organizes and
interprets stimuli into a meaningful and coherent picture of the world.
●​ It can be described as ‘how we see the world around us’.
●​ Interpretations of the stimulus based on his own biases, needs and experiences.

THE PERCEPTUAL PROCESS

●​ Sensation refers to the immediate and direct response of our sensory receptors to a stimuli.
●​ A stimulus is any unit of input to any of the senses. Examples color, sound, odor or packaging, brand names
and advertisements.
●​ Sensory receptors are the human organs (the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin) that receive sensory inputs.

​
​
From Sensation to Perception:
SENSORY SYSTEMS
●​ External stimuli, or sensory inputs, can be received on a number of channels. E.g. see an advertising hoarding
and billboards, hear a jingle, feel the softness of a cashmere sweater, taste a new flavor of ice cream or smell
a leather jacket
●​ Sensory inputs picked up by our five senses constitute the raw data that generate many types of responses.
●​ Stimuli evoke historical imagery, in which events that actually occurred are recalled.
●​ Fantasy imagery results when an entirely new, imaginary experience is the response to sensory data.
●​ These responses are an important part of hedonic consumption, or fantasy and emotional aspects of
consumers’ interactions with products.

Hedonic Consumption
●​ Hedonic consumption: multisensory, fantasy, and emotional aspects of consumers’ interactions with
products.
●​ It involves use of a product to fulfill fantasies and satisfy emotions.
●​ This unique sensory quality of a product helps to stand out from the competition especially if the brand creates
a unique association with the sensation
●​ The sensations we experience are “context effects” that subtly influence consumers thought about product.
●​ Products once strictly functional, consumers then want hedonic value too. E.g. Target focuses on products with
great design as well as functionality.
Learning Objective 1
The design of a product is now a key driver of its success or failure. E.g. Coca Cola Bottles
For example: Omni Luxury Hotel chain’s website to reserve a room, customers hear the sound of soft chimes
playing. The signature scent of lemongrass and green tea hits them as they enters the lobby

Sensory Systems
Consumers’ senses play quite a role in the marketers decisions
1.​ Vision
2.​ Scent
3.​ Sound
4.​ Touch
5.​ Taste

Vision
●​ Color
○​ Marketers rely heavily on visual elements in advertising, store design and packaging
○​ Communicate meanings via color, size, and style
○​ Color provokes emotions
○​ Red - feeling of arousal and stimulate appetite
○​ Blue - more relaxing feeling
○​ Some reactions to color come from learned association. E.g. black is the color of mourning in west
where in east white plays this role. Black refers to power in hockey and aggression in football teams
○​ Biological reactions and cultural differences- women are drawn towards brighter tones, more sensitive
to subtle shadings and patterns
○​ Female see color better than males
○​ Age - White appeal to old age people e.g. white car
○​ Color forecasting – for a new trend so brands can be sure they stock up on the next hot hue
• WHITE – White is associated with innocence, purity, peace and contentment. It’s considered clean and sterile. It’s
cool and refreshing. White can have a calming, stabilizing influence.
• BLACK – Black is the ultimate power color. It suggests strength, authority, boldness, seriousness, stability and
elegance. It’s distinguished and classic, great for creating drama. Black has more weight than other colors.​
• Gray or Silver – Gray can be associated with conservative qualities and considered traditional. Business-wise, it
symbolizes high tech and suggests authority, practicality, earnestness and creativity.​
• GOLD – Gold suggests wealth. It’s considered to be very classy.​
• BLUE – Blue is the favorite color of many businesses. It inspires confidence. It is the most popular and second most
powerful color. Darker shades are authoritative. Dark and bright blues represent trust, security, faithfulness and dignity.
Paler shades can imply freshness and cleanliness, although they can imply weakness.​
• RED – Red stimulates many kinds of appetites. Red commands attention, alerts us and creates a sense of urgency.
It’s considered the sexiest of all colors. Red symbolizes heat, fire, blood, love, warmth, power, excitement, energy,
strength, passion, vitality, risk, danger and aggressiveness.​
• YELLOW – Yellow is the sunshine hue and is a spiritual color. Yellow represents a warning, but it can also bring
happiness and warmth. The most preferred yellows are the creamy and warm ones. Bright yellow can be irritable to
the eye in large quantities. Yellow speeds metabolism. It’s often used to highlight or draw attention.
•GREEN – People associate green with the color of money, as well as nature. Olive greens are associated with health
and freshness — a good choice for environmental concerns. Green represents jealousy. Businesses use it to
communicate status and wealth. Green is a calming, refreshing color that is very easy on the eyes.
• BROWN – Brown is associated with nature and the earth. Dark browns represent wood or leather. Brown and
shades of cream are associated with warmth and coziness. Brown suggests richness, politeness, helpfulness and
effectiveness. It is solid, credible, mature and reliable. Light brown implies genuineness.
• ORANGE – Orange is associated with vibrancy and the tropics, as well as warmth and contentment. It can instill a
sense of fun and excitement. It implies health. It suggests pleasure, cheer, endurance, generosity and ambition. It can
make an expensive product seem more affordable. It appeals to a wide range of people, both male and female
Color in the marketplace
The text in the ad of Dreft Washing Powder reads: ‘Where would the bright orange be without Dreft?’
Orange is the national color of the Netherlands, so the ad simultaneously underlines the color-protecting qualities of
the product and, through the national color code, refers to the strength of the Dutch nation.

Color in the marketplace

A Danish company introduced white cheese in red package (maximum visibility) as a “sister product” to an existing
blue “Castello” cheese, under the name of Castello Bianco.
Later, the company relaunched it in a white package and named it “White Castello”, sales doubled.
​
Color in the marketplace
​Some color combinations come to be so strongly associated with a corporation that they become known as the
company’s trade dress, and courts may even grant exclusive use of specific color combinations. E.g. Eastman Kodak
​
Color in the marketplace
Campbell Soup Company
The slight changes in the design of Campbell’s canned soups illustrate the company’s efforts to keep the central,
traditional features of the brand packaging while making sure that the product does not begin to look dated.

●​ Size
○​ We tend to eat more:
■​ When food container is larger
■​ When our plate still contains food
■​ When we see variety of foods
○​ We focus on height rather than width when pouring liquid into a glass

2. Scents
Odors or fragrance cues are processed in the limbic system (most primitive part of brain where we experience
immediate emotions). An interest in scent has initiated new products for marketers.
●​ Scented clothes
●​ Scented stores
●​ Scented cars
●​ Scented household products
●​ Scented ads

3. Smell
●​ Odors can stir the emotions or have a calming effect.
●​ Can invoke memories or relieve stress. E.g. Baby-powder scent in fragrances, the smell connotes comfort and
warmth’ (past association)
●​ Starbucks reverted to its old policy i.e. baristas grind a batch of coffee beans each time than once each
morning to reclaim lost customers by intensifying the smell of the beans when they enter the store.

Learning Objective 2
Products and commercial messages often appeal to our senses, but because of the abundance of these messages,
most won’t influence us.

Key Concepts in Use of Sound

Audio watermarking- Brands weave a sound/motif into a piece of music which acts like an earworm by getting into
our head and we keep humming it
Sound symbolism- words that sound like what they mean sound symbolism as a way to influence brand image with
sound. E.g. Buzzz, Hmmm
Examples
Audio watermarking helps message retention
Coke commercials and its pop sound of opening the bottle
Mc Donald's 111244622 I’m loving it! And TeleFun 090078601
Kurkure chips – terah hai per mera hai

4. Sound
Sound affects people’s feelings and behaviors
●​ Advertising jingles creates brand awareness
●​ Background music creates desired moods
●​ Stores and restaurants often play certain kinds of music to create a certain mood

5. Touch
●​ Haptic senses (tactile sense) or “touch”—is the most basic of senses
●​ Participants who simply touch an item for 30 seconds or less had a greater level of attachment with the
product.
●​ This connection in turn boosted what they were willing to pay for it.
●​ Tactile cues have symbolic meaning - textures of fabrics associated with underlying product qualities
●​ Perceived richness or quality of the material in clothing or bedding is linked to its ‘feel’, whether it is rough or
smooth, soft or stiff
●​ A smooth fabric such as silk is equated with luxury, while denim is considered practical and durable
●​ Individuals who score high on a "Need for Touch" (NFT) scale respond strongly to the haptic dimension.
Problem for online sellers

Just as fabrics are prized for their texture, some drinks are presented as having a luxurious ‘feel’. This ad for Velvet
Hot Chocolate links the chocolate drink to a well known brand of chocolate, and ties them together as ‘irresistible’.

6.​ Taste
●​ Consumers’ taste receptors contribute to their product experience. E.g. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use the
tongue to test the quality of corn syrups.
●​ Cultural changes determine desirable tastes- ethnic dishes equals spicy food
●​ Companies use ‘sensory panelists' as tasters because of superior sensory abilities, or have six months’
training or they rely on ordinary consumers
●​ In a blind taste test, panelists rate the products of a company and its competitors on a number of dimensions.

Exposure
●​ Exposure occurs when a stimulus comes within range of someone’s sensory receptors
●​ Some consumers can pick up sensory information better than others
●​ We can concentrate, ignore, or completely miss stimuli
●​
Stage 1: Key Concepts in Exposure
Thresholds are the idea that our senses have limits
●​ Sensory threshold
●​ Psychophysics
●​ Absolute threshold
●​ Differential threshold
●​ JND (Just noticeable difference)

1.​ Sensory Thresholds ( Perceptual Thresholds): There are some stimuli that people cannot perceive, that
stimuli may be above or below a person’s sensory thresholds (the point at which it is strong enough to make
a conscious impact in his or her awareness)
 2.​ Psychophysics is a relationship between incoming physical stimuli and the consumer’s responses to them. It
focuses on integration of the physical environment into our personal world
3.​ Absolute threshold: the minimum amount of stimulation that can be detected on a given sensory channel.
E.g. sound of a dog whistle is too high for human ears to detect – it is beyond our auditory absolute threshold.
4.​ Differential Threshold: Minimum difference between two stimuli is the j.n.d. (just noticeable difference)
Example: Reduce size of biscuits to cut costs, change is under the j.n.d.

Perceptual Thresholds Challenge

Brands need to update their images without sacrificing the brand image they have worked years to cultivate.
HOW?
The trick is to make a product, logo, trademark or package different enough so that people will notice the change, yet
not so different that consumers will think its no longer the same product. The Pepsi Logo Evolves

Subliminal Perception
●​ Subliminal perception occurs when stimulus is below the level of the consumer’s awareness. Most
researchers believe that subliminal techniques are not of much use in marketing.

Subliminal Techniques
●​ Embeds: figures that are inserted into magazine advertising by using high-speed photography or airbrushing.
●​ Subliminal auditory perception: sounds, music, or voice text inserted into advertising.

Example of subliminal marketing done wrong

​
​
​
Second Stage: Attention
●​ Attention - extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus. Consumers are in a state of
sensory overload- exposed to more information than they can process (clutter).Marketers need to break
through the clutter (mess).
●​
Perceptual Selection Factors
●​ Experience is the result of acquiring and processing stimulation over time
●​ Personal Selection Factors are based on experiences and they are also known as Perceptual Filters

Perceptual Filters: past experiences influence what we decide to process

1.Perceptual vigilance- pay attention to stimuli related to your current need
●
2.Perceptual defense (reverse of perceptual vigilance)- people see what they want to see and don’t see what they
don’t want to see

●​ Adaptation: Degree to which consumers continue to notice a stimulus over time. No attention to a familiar
stimulus. After familiarity, increasingly stronger doses of stimulus to notice it
Several factors can lead to adaptation:
1.Intensity
2.Duration
3.Exposure
4.Discrimination
5.Relevance

Stimulus Selection Factors

●​ Characteristics of the stimulus itself play an important role in determining what we notice and what we ignore
●​ A message creates contrast in several ways:
○​ Differences in size, color, position, & novelty
●​ Stimuli that appear in unexpected ways or places to grab attention (less competition for attention)

Third Stage: Interpretation

●​ Interpretation: assigned meaning to stimuli
○​ It depends on the Schema (set of beliefs) which leads to stimulus evaluation

Stimulus Organization – Interpretational Biases: the eye of the beholder

●​ Stimulus interpretation is associated with related events, sensations, or images
●​ Our brain connects new sensations to existing information using principles from Gestalt psychology.
●​ Gestalt: “the whole is greater than the sum of it parts”
●​ People interpret meaning from the totality of set of stimuli rather than from any individual stimulus
●​ It provides many principles that relate to the way our brain organizes stimuli.
○​ Closure- people tend to perceive an incomplete picture as complete
○​ Similarity- group together objects that have same physical characteristics
○​ Figure-ground- foreground vs background i.e. one part of the stimulus will dominate (figure) those that
are in the background (ground)
Semiotics
●​ Semiotics: Field of study that examines the correspondence between signs and symbols and their roles in
how we assign meaning
●​ In Semiotic perspective, every marketing message has three basic components
1.Object
2.Sign
3.Interpretation

Semiotic Relationships
Semiotics (Cont’d): Signs relate to object in one of three ways

Perceptual Positioning
How does a marketer determine where a product actually stands in the minds of consumers?

●​ Brand perceptions = functional attributes + symbolic attributes

●​ Perceptual map - Company’s own strengths and weaknesses in comparison with competitors

Positioning Strategy
●​ Marketing mix elements influence the consumer’s interpretation of brand’s meaning
●​ Marketers can use many dimensions to carve out a Brand’s position as a function of:
○​ Lifestyle, price leadership, attributes, product class, competitors, occasions, users, and quality
Examples of brand positioning

Chapter Summary
●​ Perception is a three-stage process that translates
raw stimuli into meaning.
●​ Products and messages may appeal to our senses.
●​ The design of a product affects our perception of it.
●​ Subliminal advertising is controversial.
●​ We interpret stimuli using learned patterns.
●​ Marketers use symbols to create meaning.