PERCEPTION & MEMORY

Consumer Behavior
Sem 1, 2023-2024

Adapted from Hoyer W. D., MacInnis D. J. and Pieters R. (2018), Consumer Behavior, 7th ed., Cengage Learning.
Learning objectives
1. Discuss why marketers are concerned about consumers’ exposure to marketing
stimuli and what tactics they use to enhance exposure

2. Explain the characteristics of attention and how marketers can try to attract and
sustain consumers’ attention with products and marketing messages

3. Describe the major senses that are part of perception and outline why marketers
are concerned about consumers’ sensory perceptions

4. Discuss the process of comprehension, and outline how marketing-mix elements

can affect consumer inferences about products and brands

5. Distinguish among sensory, working, long-term, implicit, and explicit memory, and
explain why marketers must be aware of these different types of memory
Exposure Attention Perception Memory
Exposure
 Consumer comes into physical contact with a stimulus

• Marketing stimuli: Information about offerings communicated by the

marketer or by nonmarketing sources

 Factors of influence

• Position of an ad within a medium

• Product distribution

• Shelf placement
Selective exposure

 Zipping: Fast-forwarding through commercials on a program recorded earlier

 Zapping: Switching channels during commercial breaks

 Cord-cutting: Choosing streaming services over cable television

•The first 5s of an ad is critical!

•The ad should be pleasurable, entertaining, interesting and involving
•Ads placed either at the beginning or the end of commercial breaks
•Use visual elements (logo…)
Attention
 Amount of mental activity a consumer devotes to a stimulus

 Enables consumer to learn efficiently from their exposure to marketing

stimuli

 Limited, selective, and divisible

 Defines customer segments

 Weakened by habituation
Selective attention
Under what conditions do you give full attention to advertising and
marketing communication?
Stimulus that attract consumer attention
 Personal relevance
• Appealing to one’s needs, values, emotions, or goals
 Pleasantness
• Using attractive models, music, and humor
 Element of surprise
• Using novelty, unexpectedness, and puzzles
 Easy to process
• Prominence and concreteness of stimuli
• Limited number of competing stimuli
• Contrast with competing stimuli
Perception
 Determining the properties of stimuli using vision, hearing, taste, smell, and
touch

 Factors in visual perception

• Size and shape

• Lettering

• Image location on package

• Color

• Appearance of being new or worn

Perception
 Elements in sound perception
• Sonic identity - Use of specific sounds to identify a brand
• Sound symbolism - Inference of product attributes and evaluations
• Using information obtained from hearing a brand’s sounds, syllables, and
words

 Taste
• Varying perceptions of food
• Different cultural backgrounds influence taste preference

• In-store marketing tactic of tasting or sampling of food

Perception
 Smell
• Effect on physiological responses, liking, product trial, and buying

 Touch
• Liking of some products because of their feel

• Perceived ownership of the item increases

• Consumer reaction to touch differs across cultures

Consumers’ stimuli perception

 Absolute thresholds  Differential thresholds (just

• Minimal level of stimulus noticeable difference)
intensity needed to detect • Intensity difference needed
stimulus between two stimuli before they
are perceived to be different
 Subliminal perception
• Activation of sensory receptors by
stimuli presented below the
perceptual threshold
JND – When do you want consumers to notice?
JND – When do you want consumers to notice?
JND – Logo changes
JND – Me-too products
Subliminal perception
Knowledge to understand: comprehension

 Comprehension: extracting higher-order Cultural

meaning from what individuals have perceived

Linguistic
in context of what is already known
• Assign meanings to stimuli to which we attend Personal
Knowledge to understand: comprehension
 Objective comprehension
• Extent to which the consumer accurately
understands the message the sender
intends to communicate
 Subjective comprehension
• What the consumer understands from
the message, regardless of whether it is
accurate
 Miscomprehension
• Consumers inaccurately interpret the
meaning in a message
 Misperception occurs at times.
What can we do to correct it?

Hersey's Syrup advertisement in 1996 used a playful approach

to call attention to a potential product misperception.
Most environmental messaging does not emphasize the
inherent hierarchy of the 3Rs - the fact that reducing
and reusing are listed ahead of recycling.
 Consumers often over-emphasize the importance of
recycling packaging instead of reducing product
consumption to the extent possible and reusing items
to extend their lifetime.
Knowledge to understand: comprehension

 Effects of cultures
• Differences in low-context
cultures and high-context
cultures

• Message sender's social class,

values, and age play a key
role in message
interpretation

• Language differences
Cross-cultural marketing strategy
 There is controversy about the extent to which cross-cultural
marketing strategies, particularly advertising, should be standardized.

 The same advertisement can be interpreted differently in different countries

 Consumers' interpretations of the brand personality may be different in different

countries

 Some companies acknowledge national differences and make suitable

adaptations in their marketing mix.
 Eating pizza
… or burger …
with chopsticks???
Marketing implications to improve comprehension

 Keeping the message simple

 Repeating the message

 Presenting information in different forms

 Designing a message consistent with consumer's prior knowledge

Consumer inference
 Consumers learn about products
from various sources (e.g.
advertising, WOM)

 But consumers don’t learn

everything they need to know to
help them judge these products

 So consumers fill in the remaining

Low price means low quality?
information by making inferences
Consumer inference
 Brand names and symbols  Price
• Create subjective comprehension • Culture can influence perceptions
and inferences of price and quality

 Product features and packaging  Message wording

• Product attributes  Retail atmospherics, display, and
distribution
• Country of origin

• Package design
Consumer memory
 Memory: Persistence of learning over time, via storage and retrieval of
information, either consciously or unconsciously
• Retrieval: Process of remembering or accessing what was previously stored in
memory
Solomon, M. R (2020). Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being. 13rd Ed., Pearson.
Elaborative rehearsal
 A cognitive process of elaborative rehearsal allows information to move from
STM into LTM. This involves thinking about the meaning of a stimulus and
relating it to other information already in memory.

 Marketers assist in the process when they devise catchy slogans or jingles that
consumers repeat on their own.
Implications of imagery processing for marketers
 Working memory, particularly imagery processing, has several key
implications for marketers.

 Imagery
• Improves the amount of information that can be processed

• Stimulates future choice

• Realistic imagery improves consumer satisfaction

Types of memory
 Explicit memory
• Consumers are consciously aware that they remember something

• Explicit memory expresses itself in two forms: recognition and recall

 Implicit memory
• Consumers are not consciously aware that they remember something

• Leads to processing fluency

 Much of our memory is implicit, and this is efficient.

Remember the mere exposure effect?

Techniques to enhance memory
 Factors that affect attention also affect memory and, ultimately, recognition
and recall

 Chunking - Group of items that are processed as a unit

 Rehearsal - Active and conscious interaction with the material one is trying to
remember

 Recirculation - Encountering information repeatedly

 Elaboration: Transferring information to long-term memory by processing at

deeper levels