PERCEPTUAL SELECTION IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
PERCEPTUAL SELECTION IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: Consumers subconsciously exercise a. great deal of selectivity as to which aspects Of the environment—which stimuli—they perceive, An individual may look at some things, ignore others, and turn away from still others. In total, people actually receive—or perceive—only a small fraction of the stimuli to which they are exposed. Consider, for example, a woman in a supermarket.
She is exposed to literally thousands of products of different colors, size, and shapes, to perhaps a hundred people (looking, Walking, searching, talking), to smells fruit, from meat, from disinfectant, from people), to sounds within the store (cash registers ringing, shopping cars rolling, air conditioners humming, and clerks sweeping, mopping aisles, stocking shelves), and to sounds from outside the store (planes passing, cars honking’ tires screeching, children shouting, car doors slamming).
Yet she manages on a regular basis to visit her local supermarket, select the items she needs, pay for them, and leave, all within a relatively brief time, without losing her sanity or her personal orientation to the world around her. This is because she exercise selectivity in perception.
Which stimuli get selected depends on two major factors in addition to the nature stimulus itself, the consumer’s previous experience as it affects her expectations (what she prepared, or “set”, to see) and her motives at the time (her needs, desires, interests, and so on). Each of these factors can serve to increase or decrease the probability that the stimulus will be perceived, and each can effect the consumer’s selective exposure to and selective awareness of the stimulus itself.
1. Nature of the Stimulus in Perceptual Selection
Market stimuli include an enormous number of variables that affect the consumer behaviour or perception of consumer, such as
- Nature of Product
- Physical appearance of Product
- Package Design
- Brand Name
- The advertisements and commercials
- Position of commercial
- Time of commercial
- Editorial environment
2. Expectations in perceptual selection
People usually see what they expect to see, and what they expect to see is usually based on familiarity, previous experience, or preconditioned “see”.
In a marketing context, people tend to perceive products and product attributes according to their own expectations. The man who has been told by his friends that new brand of Scotch has a bitter taste will probably perceive the taste to be bitter, a teenager who attends a horror movie that has been billed as terrifying will probably find it so.
3. Motives in perceptual selection
People tend to perceive things they need or want ; the stronger the need, the greater the tendency to ignore unrelated stimuli in the environment. A business man concerned with fitness and health is more likely to notice and to read carefully an ad for a health club than one who is without such concerns.
4. Attitudes in Perceptual Selection
Consumer attitudes are a composite of a consumer’s
(1) beliefs about,
(2) feelings about,
(3) and behavioural intentions toward some object–within the context of marketing, usually a brand or retail store.
These components are viewed together since they are highly interdependent and together represent forces that influence how the consumer will react to the object. It is evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people or value. It reflects how we feel about something.
5. Interest in perceptual selection
State that power the force an attitude has towards manifestation in a person’s behaviour
6. Experience in perceptual selection
It states that anticipation of a particular behaviour from a person that affects what a person perceives.