C2: Perception

• Sensation is the immediate response of our sensory receptors to basic stimuli like light, color and sound.
• Perception is the process by which sensations are selected, organized, and interpreted.
• Perception can be more influential than sensation when determining consumer preferences.
• Sensory marketing: organizations pay extra attention to the impact of sensation on our product experiences.
• Colors influence emotions, for example, red can evoke arousal and stimulated appetite, while blue can induce relaxation.
• The Figure-Ground Principle states that one part of a stimulus will dominate (the 'figure') and other parts will recede into the background (the 'ground').
• The principle of similarity states that we tend to group together objects that share the same physical characteristics.
• Marketing mix elements influence consumers' interpretations of a brand's meaning.
• A brand's position is a function of lifestyle, price leadership, attributes, product class, competitors, occasions, users, and quality.
• Some reactions to color come from learned associations, for example, black is associated with mourning in US, but is associated with white in Japan.
• Some reactions to colors come from biological and cultural differences, for example, women usually are drawn to brighter tones, patterns, and subtle shadings, while older people often see colors with a more dull cast, therefore preferring white/bright tones.
• Some color combinations are so strongly associated with a corporation that they become known as the company’s trade dress, for example, Tiffany blue.
• Guerilla marketing involves using communications that are unexpected and unconventional and target consumers in unexpected places.
• Perceptual vigilance is aware of stimuli that relate to their current needs.
• Attention is the extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimuli.
• Adaption is the degree to which consumers continue to notice a stimuli over time.
• Stimulus selection theory suggests that we are more likely to notice stimuli that differ from others around them in terms of size, color, position, novelty.
• There is a lot of competition for our attention with 40k pieces of advertising/day leading to sensory overload and too much to process, making it difficult for marketers to break through.
• Campbell’s uses JND to pass cost to consumers.
• Perceptual defence is the process of seeing what you want to see and ignoring what you don’t want to see.
• Perceptual filters are based on past experiences and influence what consumers decide to process.
• Subliminal perception occurs when a stimulus is below the level of a consumer’s awareness.
• Odours stir emotion or create calm feelings, for example, a study found that the smell of fresh cinnamons induced sexual arousal in males.
• Scent marketing: cars to fragrances, companies spend 80mil.
• Background music creates desired moods, sound affects people's feelings and behaviours, for example, high tempo music is more stimulating, while low tempo music is more relaxing.
• Touching affects product experience, for example, waiters who touch patrons are more likely to get bigger tips.
• Touchscreens have other effects on our behaviour, for example, the orientation of the product affects the way in which consumers swipe on the screen, they will swipe in the direction of the product’s orientation and this leads to increased liking.
• The endowment effect occurs when consumers ascribe more value to something simply because they own it, for example, touching an item helps form a relationship with it.
• Kansei engineering: a philosophy that translates customers’ feelings into design elements, for example, Coca-Cola bottles.
• Flavour houses develop new concoctions for consumer palates, cultural changes determines desirable tastes, for example, wine enthusiasts taste 100’s of wines.
• Exposure: occurs when a stimulus comes within range of someone’s sensory receptors, consumers can choose to focus or ignore this information.
• Absolute threshold: minimum amount of stimulation that can be detected on a given sensory channel, differential threshold: ability of a sensory system to detect changes between 2 stimuli, just noticeable difference (JND): minimum difference that can be detected between 2 stimuli.
• an example of sublimal perception is a technique like embed involve inserting tiny figures into magazine advertising by using high speed photography or airbrushing.