MKTG 450 Chapter 5: Perception
Ch. 5 Perception
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, and texture
Marketers are more effective when they appeal to several senses
Perception: process by which people select, organize, and interpret these sensations.
• Focuses on what we add to these raw sensations in order to give them meaning
External stimuli (sensory inputs): these inputs are raw data that begin the perceptual process. Sensory
data from the external environment ex. Hearing a tune on the radio can generate internal sensory
experiences.
Ex. A song might trigger a young man’s memory of his first dance
Hedonic consumption: multisensory, fantasy, and emotion aspects of consumers’ interactions with
products
Context effect: subtle cues in the environment that influence a person’s decisions
• Respondents evaluated products more harshly standing on tile floor rather than carpet
• Fans of romance movies rate them higher when standing in a cold room
• When a product is scented consumers are more likely to remember other attributes about it
after they encounter it
Objective 1: the design of a product is now a key driver of its success of failure
Sensory marketing: (emphasizes the link between our senses and product experiences) marketing
strategies that focus on the impact of sensations on our product experiences
Consumers want to buy things that give them hedonic value in addition to functional value. Often
believe that most brands perform similarly, so they weigh a product’s aesthetic qualities heavily when
they select a brand
Form is function. Design is substance. Brains are wired to appreciate good design
• Vision:
o Communicate meanings on the visual channel through a product’s color, size, and
styling
o Colors influence our emotions
▪ Red: feelings of arousal and stimulate appetite
▪ Blue: more relaxing feelings
o Reactions to colors can come from learned associations ex. Black is morning in western
countries
o Reactions to color are a result of biological and cultural differences
▪ Ex. Women are more drawn to brighter tones and more sensitive to subtle
shadings and patterns
▪ Ex. Colors look duller to older people so they prefer white and bright tones
o Perceptions of a color depend on both its physical wavelength and how the mind
responds to that stimulus
▪ Yellow: middle of wavelengths so it is brightest and attracts attention
▪ Choice of color palette is key to package design
▪ Trade dress: color combinations that become strongly associated with a
corporation
• Courts may grant exclusive use of specific color combinations
• Ex. Kodak’s trade dress protects its usage of its distinctive yellow, black,
and red boxes
o Dollars and scents:
▪ Higher recall of a brand’s attributes if it was embedded with a scent
▪ Many consumers control the orders in their environment
▪ Ex. Folgers found that smell of coffee summons childhood memories of their
mothers cooking breakfast so the aroma reminds them of home.
▪ Fragrance cues are processed in the limbic system: the most primitive part of
the brain and the place where we experience immediate emotions
▪ Sensory signature: what characteristic of the product leaves a sensory
impression in people’s mind
• Ex. Dippin’ dots
o Sound
▪ Objective 2: products and commercial messages often appeal to our senses,
but because of the profusion of these messages most of them won’t influence
us.
▪ not all sensations make it through the perceptual process. Many stimuli
compete for our attention, we don’t notice or accurately interpret the majority
of them.
▪ Audio watermarking: ex. Coca-cola and the world cup: a technique where
composers and producers weave a distinctive sound/motif into a piece of music
that sticks in people’s minds over time
• Watermarking acts like an “earworm” which gets inside our brains and
becomes so compulsive that we go around humming it as we walk down
the street and not understanding why
▪ Sound symbolism: the process by which the way a word sounds influences our
assumptions about what it describes and attributes, such as size
• Consumers more likely to recognize brand names that begin with a hard
consonant like K (kellogg’s) or P (pepsi)
• Associate certain vowel and consonant sounds (phonemes) with
perceptions of large and small size
o Mental rehearsal of prices contain numbers with small
phonemes results in overestimation of price discounts, whereas
mental rehearsal of prices containing numbers with large
phonemes results in underestimation
o Touch:
▪ those who simply touched an item for 30 seconds or less created a greater level
of attachment to the product, boosted what they were willing to pay for it
▪ Diners whom wait staff touched gave bigger tips
▪ Haptic (touch) sense: touch related senses: appear to moderate the relationship
between product experience and judgment confidence
• We are more sure about what we perceive when we can touch it
• A high score on “need for touch” (NFT) scale individuals respond
strongly to the haptic dimension
▪ Kinsei engineering (a Japanese philosophy): a philosophy that translates
customers’ feelings into design elements.
• Ex. Make a stick shift exactly 9.5cm long conveys the optimal feeling of
sportiness and control
• Chrysler 300C designed to make you feel taller by having a higher H-
point (refers to the location of the seated driver’s hip)
▪ Natural user interface: a philosophy of computer design that incorporates
habitual human movements that we don’t have to learn
• ex. Digital cameras, touchscreens, GPS devices
o Taste:
▪ “flavor houses” develop new concoctions to please the changing palates of
consumers
▪ Alpha M.O.S. sells a sophisticated electronic tongue for tasting
▪ Cultural factors determine the tastes we find desirable
Objective 3: perception is a three-stage process that translates raw stimuli into meaning
Perception: process by which physical sensations, such as sights, sounds, and smells, are selected,
organized, and interpreted
Perceptual map: widely used to evaluate the relative standing of competing brands along releveant
dimensions
The stages of perception
1. Exposure
2. Attention
3. Interpretation
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
• Some stimuli people simply can’t perceive
• Sensory threshold: the point at which the stimuli 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
o the science that focuses on how the physical environment is integrated into the
consumer’s subjective experience
• absolute threshold: refers to the minimum amount of stimulation a person can detect on a
given sensory channel
o ex. A dog whistle emits at too high a frequency for human ears to pick up, so this
stimulus is beyond our auditory absolute threshold
o ex. Most entertaining copy but billboard is wasted if print is too small
Document Summary
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, and texture. Marketers are more effective when they appeal to several senses. Perception: process by which people select, organize, and interpret these sensations: focuses on what we add to these raw sensations in order to give them meaning. External stimuli (sensory inputs): these inputs are raw data that begin the perceptual process. Hearing a tune on the radio can generate internal sensory experiences. A song might trigger a young man"s memory of his first dance. Hedonic consumption: multisensory, fantasy, and emotion aspects of consumers" interactions with products. Objective 1: the design of a product is now a key driver of its success of failure. Sensory marketing: (emphasizes the link between our senses and product experiences) marketing strategies that focus on the impact of sensations on our product experiences.
