CHAPTER 3 CONSUMER BEHAVIOR.pptx

Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having,
and Being
Thirteenth Edition
Chapter 3
Perception
Copyright © 2020, 2017, 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Learning Objectives
3.1 Products and commercial messages often appeal to our
senses, but because of the profusion of these messages
we don’t notice most of them
3.2 Perception is a three-stage process that translates raw
stimuli into meaning
3.3 The field of semiotics helps us to understand how
marketers use symbols to create meaning.

Learning Objective 3.1
Products and commercial messages often appeal to our
senses, but because of the profusion of these messages we
don’t notice most of them

Sensation
• Sensation refers to the immediate response of our sensory receptors
– eyes
– ears
– nose
– mouth
– fingers
– skin
• to basic stimuli such as
– light
– color
– sound
– odor
– texture

Sensation
• Perception is the process by which people
– select
– organize
– interpret these sensations

• Vision
Ex: store design, packaging, color, size, design
• Scent(smell)
Ex: Starbucks
• Sound
Ex: music in stores to create a certain mood.
• Touch
Ex: touching the product makes a greater attachment with it.
• Taste
Ex: experience taste of food.
These are called the brand sensory system.

Sensation
• Our senses play quite a role in the decisions marketers
make.
• Marketers rely heavily on visual elements in advertising,
store design, and packaging.
• They communicate meanings on the visual channel
through a product’s color, size, and styling.
• Some brands utilize scent easily. Example: Starbucks
requires baristas to grind a batch of coffee each time they
brew a post instead of just once each morning to ensure
customers have that intense smell during their Starbucks’
experience.

Sensation
• Stores and restaurants often play certain kinds of music to
create a certain mood.
• Recent research found that 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.
• A food item’s image and the values we attach to it
influence how we experience the actual taste. These
aspects can be called a brand’s sensory system.
• The Coca-Cola bottle also illustrates an example of how
design can facilitate product success.

Sensation

Sensory Marketing
• Companies think carefully about the impact of sensations
on our product experiences.

Sensory Marketing
Vision
• Marketers rely heavily on visual elements in advertising, store design,
and packaging. They communicate meanings on the visual channel
through a product’s color, size, and styling.
• Colors may even influence our emotions more directly. Evidence
suggests that some colors (particularly red) create feelings of arousal
and stimulate appetite, and others (such as blue) create more relaxing
feelings.
• There are gender differences in color preferences. People associate
darker colors with males and lighter colors with females. Women are
drawn toward brighter tones and they are more sensitive to subtle
shadings and patterns.
• Some color combinations come to be so strongly associated with a
corporation that they become known as the company’s trade dress.
• A handful of firms produce color forecasts.

Vision (2 of 2)
Table 3.1 Marketing Applications of Colors
Color Associations Marketing Applications
Yellow Optimistic and youthful Used to grab window shoppers’
attention
Red Energy Often seen in clearance sales
Blue Trust and security Banks
Green Wealth Used to create relaxation in
stores
Orange Aggressive Call to action: subscribe, buy or
sell
Black Powerful and sleek Luxury products
Purple Soothing Beauty or anti-aging products
Source: Adapted from Leo Widrich, “Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors in
Marketing,” Fast Company (May 6, 2013), fastcompany.com accessed February 23, 2015.

Trade Dress
• The design and shape of the materials in which a
product is packaged.
• Product configuration, the design and shape of the
product itself, may also be considered a form of trade
dress.
• Trade dress is a trademark law that protects the
look and feel of a product and distinguishes it
from other similar products.

Trade Dress

Dollars and Scents(SMELL)
• Like color, odor can also stir emotions and memory. Odors
stir emotions or create a calming feeling. They invoke
memories or relieve stress
• Scent Marketing is a form of sensory marketing that we
may see in lingerie, detergents, and more.
• Marketers are seeking ways to exploit the power of scent.
You may notice products with scent such as aircraft cabins.
A consistent scent could ultimately register with
consumers as a brand’s sensory signature
• We process fragrance cues in the limbic system, the most
primitive part of the brain and the place where we
experience immediate emotions.

Sounds
• Music and other sounds affect people’s feelings and
behaviors.
• Sound symbolism is the process by which the way a
word sounds influences our assumptions about what it
describes and attributes

Key Concepts in Use of Sound
• Audio watermarking: Audio watermarking is the process of
adding a distinctive sound pattern — undetectable to the
human ear — to an audio signal to make it identifiable to a
computer. It's one of the ways that video sites recognize
copyrighted recordings that have been posted illegally.

Key Concepts in Use of Sound
• Sound symbolism as a way to influence brand image with
sound. Sounds can even influence how we feel about size!
Consumers are more likely to recognize brand names that
begin with a hard consonant (K or P). Vowel and consonant
sounds (or phenomes) can even be associated with
perceptions of large and small.

Touch
• The natural user interface incorporates habitual
human movements that we don’t have to learn. (Siri)
• The endowment effect occurs when people imagine
owning a particular object. (car test drive)
• Researchers are starting to identify the important role
the haptic (touch) sense plays in consumer behavior.
• Kansei engineering is a philosophy that translates
customers’ feelings into design elements.

Kansei Engineering

Taste
• Taste is a huge driver behind the $46 billion Americans
spend on food and beverages in a year.
• All foods are a combination of five basic tastes:
sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and
umami (a savory taste).

Augmented and Virtual Reality
• Augmented reality (AR) refers to media that
superimpose one or more digital layers of data,
images, or video over a physical object.
• The imminent explosion of virtual reality (VR)
technology in the consumer market also is driving the
integration between physical sensations and digital
information. Unlike AR that delivers a combination of
both sensory experiences, VR provides a totally
immersive experience that transports the user into an
entirely separate 3D environment.

For Reflection (1 of 8)
• Imagine you are the marketing consultant for the package
design of a new brand of premium chocolate.
• What recommendations would you make regarding sight
and scent?

• Some studies suggest that as we age, our sensory
detection abilities decline. What are the implications of this
phenomenon for marketers who target elderly consumers?

• How has your sense of touch influenced your reaction to a
product?
• Which of your senses do you feel is most influential in your
perceptions of products?

Perception is a three-stage process that translates raw

Stages of Perception
Like computers, we undergo stages of information processing in
which we input and store stimuli.
Unlike computers, though, we do not passively process whatever
information happens to be present.
• Exposure
• Attention
• Interpretation

Figure 3.1 Perceptual Process

Stage 1: Key Concepts in Exposure
• Sensory threshold
• Psychophysics
• Absolute threshold
• Differential threshold
• JND
• Weber’s Law

Stage 1: Exposure
• Exposure occurs when a stimulus comes within the range of
someone’s sensory receptors.
• Consumers concentrate on some stimuli, are unaware of others,
and even go out of their way to ignore some messages.

Sensory Thresholds
• Sensory threshold is the point at which the stimulus is strong enough to make a
conscious impact in his or her awareness.
• Psychophysics focuses on how people integrate the physical environment into their
personal, subjective worlds.
• Absolute threshold refers to the minimum amount of stimulation a person can
detect on a given sensory channel. The sound a dog whistle emits is at too high a
frequency for human ears to pick up, so this stimulus is beyond our auditory absolute
threshold.
• Differential threshold refers to the ability of a sensory system to detect changes in or
differences between two stimuli.
• The minimum difference we can detect between two stimuli is the just noticeable
difference (j.n.d.)
• The stronger the initial stimulus, the greater a change in the stimulus must be for us
to notice it. This relationship is Weber’s Law.

Subliminal Perception
• Marketers want to create messages above consumers’
thresholds so people will notice them. Some consumers believe
that marketers design many advertising messages so they will
be perceived unconsciously, or below the threshold of
recognition.
• Another word for threshold is limen, and we term stimuli that
fall below the limen subliminal. Subliminal perception refers to
a stimulus below the level of the consumer’s awareness.

Stage 2: Attention
• Attention refers to the extent to which processing activity is
devoted to a particular stimulus. Consumers often experience
sensory overload; we are exposed to far more information than
we can process.

The Pepsi Logo over Time

Subliminal Perception
• Embeds

Stage 2: Attention
• Attention is the extent to which processing activity is
devoted to a particular stimulus
• Consumers experience sensory overload
• Marketers need to break through the clutter

Stage 2: Attention
• Mindfulness is a movement that encourages followers to slow down,
tune out distractions, and focus on what you’re feeling at the
moment.
• A large proportion of teens report that they engage in multitasking,
where they process information from more than one medium at a
time as they alternate among their cell phones, TVs, and laptops.
• Today we consume three times as much information each day as
people did in 1960.
• In the online world, advertisers keep innovating to get visitors to
watch their messages. One of the most popular today is rich media—
the use of animated gif files or video clips to grab viewers’ attention.
• The process of perceptual selection means that people attend to only
a small portion of the stimuli to which they are exposed.

How Do Marketers Get Attention?
Personal Selection Factors
• Perceptual vigilance means we are more likely to be aware of
stimuli that relate to our current needs.
• The flip side of perceptual vigilance is perceptual defense. This
means that we tend to see what we want to see—and we don’t
see what we don’t want to see.
• Another factor is adaptation, which is the degree to which
consumers continue to notice a stimulus over time.

How Do Marketers Get Attention?
Several factors lead to adaptation:
• Intensity—Less-intense stimuli (e.g., soft sounds or dim colors)
habituate because they have less sensory impact.
• Discrimination—Simple stimuli habituate because they do not
require attention to detail.
• Exposure—Frequently encountered stimuli habituate as the rate
of exposure increases.
• Relevance—Stimuli that are irrelevant or unimportant habituate
because they fail to attract attention

Stimulus Selection Factors
Stimulus Selection Factors
• In general, we are more likely to notice stimuli that differ from others
around them (Weber’s Law). A message creates contrast in several ways:
• Size—The size of the stimulus itself in contrast to the competition helps
to determine if it will command attention. Readership of a magazine ad
increases in proportion to the size of the ad.
• Color—Color is a powerful way to draw attention to a product or to give
it a distinct identity.
• Position – We stand a better chance of noticing stimuli that are in places
where we’re more likely to look. That’s why the competition is so heated
among suppliers to have their products displayed in stores at eye level.
• Novelty—Stimuli that appear in unexpected ways or places tend to grab
our attention.

Figure 3.3 The Golden Triangle
Eye-tracking studies reveal
that people typically spend
most of their time on a
website looking at the
“golden triangle” outlined by
yellow, orange and red.
Source: Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc. (Now Mediative Performance LP).

Interpretation
• Interpretation refers to the meanings we assign to sensory
stimuli.
• Two people can see or hear the same event, but their
interpretation of it can be as different as night and day,
depending on what they had expected the stimulus to be. The
meaning we assign to a stimulus depends on the schema, or set
of beliefs, to which we assign it.

Interpretation
Interpretational Biases: The Eye of the Beholder
• Our brains tend to relate incoming sensations to others already
in memory, based on some fundamental organizational
principles.
• These principles derive from Gestalt psychology. The German
word Gestalt roughly means whole, pattern, or configuration;
we summarize this term as “the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts.”

Interpretation
• Interpretation refers to the meaning we assign to sensory
stimuli, which is based on a schema
Source: Client: XXXLutz; Head of Marketing: Mag. Thomas Saliger; Agency: Demner,
Merlicek & Bergmann; Account Supervisor: Andrea Kliment; Account Manager: Albin
Lenzer; Creative Directors: Rosa Haider, Tolga Buyukdoganay; Art Directors: Tolga
Buyukdoganay, Rene Pichler; Copywriter: Alistair Thompson.

• How much of a change would be needed in a favorite
brand’s price, package size, or logo would be needed for
you to notice the difference?
• How would differences in these variables affect your
purchase decisions?

• Do you think that subliminal perception works?
• Under what conditions could it work?

The field of semiotics helps us to understand how marketers
use symbols to create meaning.

Stimulus Organization
• The Gestalt perspective provides several principles that relate to
the way our brains organize stimuli:
• The closure principle states that people tend to perceive an
incomplete picture as complete.
• The similarity principle tells us that consumers tend to group
together objects that share similar physical characteristics.
• The figure-ground principle states that one part of a stimulus
will dominate (the figure), and other parts recede into the
background (the ground).

• Semiotics: The Meaning of Meaning
• To help them understand how consumers interpret the
meanings of symbols, some marketers turn to semiotics, a
discipline that studies the correspondence between signs and
symbols and their roles in how we assign meanings.
• From a semiotic perspective, every marketing message has
three basic components:
• Object (the product that is the focus of the message)
• Sign (or symbol) (the sensory image that represents the
intended meaning of the object
• Interpretant (the meaning we derive from the sign).

• Signs relate to objects in one of three ways: They can resemble
objects, connect to them, or tie to them conventionally.
• An icon is a sign that resembles the product in some way
• An index is a sign that connects to a product because they share
some property
• A symbol is a sign that relates to a product by either
conventional or agreed-on associations

Hyperreality
• Hyperreality refers to the process of making real what is initially
simulation or “hype.” Advertisers create new relationships
between objects and interpretants when they invent
connections between products and benefits, such as when an
ad equates Marlboro cigarettes with the American frontier
spirit.

Perceptual Positioning
• Our perception of a brand comprises both its functional
attributes (e.g., its features, its price, and so on) and its symbolic
attributes (its image and what we think it says about us when
we use it).

Figure 3.4 Semiotic Relationships
• Object
• Sign
• Interpretant
• Icon
• Index
• Symbol

Examples of Brand Positioning
Dimensions Brand Positioning
Lifestyle Grey Poupon is “high class”
Price leadership L’Oreal sells Noisome brand face cream
Attributes Bounty is “quicker picker upper”
Product class The Spyder Eclipse is a sporty convertible
Competitors Northwestern Insurance is the quiet company
Occasions Use Wrigley’s gum when you can’t smoke
Users Levi’s Dockers targeted to young men
Quality At Ford, “Quality is Job 1”

Think of a commercial you have recently seen and explain
the object, sign and interpretant.

• Give an example when you were affected by closure,
similarity, or the figure ground principle.

• How do your favorite brands position themselves in the
marketplace?
• Which possible positioning strategies seem to be most
effective?

Chapter Summary
1. Products and commercial messages often appeal to our
senses, but because of the profusion of these messages
we don’t notice most of them
2. Perception is a three-stage process that translates raw
3. The field of semiotics helps us to understand how
marketers use symbols to create meaning.

Copyright
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made available to students except by instructors using the
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honor the intended pedagogical purposes and the needs of
other instructors who rely on these materials.

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