STAGES OF PERCEPTION IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
STAGE 1: SENSORY STIMULI
There are two categories of stimuli affect a person’s perception i.e. sensory characteristics, which involve the senses, and structural characteristics, which are external elements. It’s important to realize that consumers don’t select the stimuli that affect them. Stimuli response is automatic as an internal trigger. It acts as red light and then guides them in their response.
Sensory stimuli
Sensory characteristics affect a consumer’s senses. Sensory characteristics include vision, taste, smell, sound, and feel. These are:
Vision: Vision is also known to stimulate physiological changes. It is the most dominant type of senses and most familiar use in marketing than with using any of the other senses. You can affect the perception of consumers by using color, shape, and size. For example:
- Warm colors, such as red and orange, increase blood pressure and heart rate. Orange is also often used in fast-food restaurants to stimulate diners’ appetites.
- Cool colors, such as blue and green, decrease blood pressure and heart rate, Blues and greens are often used in hospitals for their calming effect and to reduce patient anxiety.
Unique size and/or shape: The size and shape of your packaging has the ability to attract new consumers to your products. For example, consider the last time you walked into a retail store and saw a uniquely shaped shampoo bottle. You more than likely were intrigued and picked up the bottle to have a second look.
Taste: Culture plays a powerful role in perception, especially when determining taste. Taste affects the success of food and beverages. For example, European food tastes very different from Korean food. The two types carry different flavors, different appearances, and different textures. The difficulty of taste as a stimulus is that everyone likes something different, so what may taste good to one consumer may not taste good to another. If you depend on taste to sell consumers on your product, your best course of action to ensure success is to conduct taste tests with them. You won’t be able to please everyone, but try to provide items that appeal to the mass of your target market.
Smell: Smell is the most direct of the senses for consumers. No other sense evokes memory more than smell. It’s proven that smelling scents remembered from childhood can result in moods like those experienced in the person’s younger years. Marketers have begun to understand this, so some are using smells to build mood effects into products. Marketers also know that using certain pleasant scents in a store increases the time consumers spend browsing. An example of the impact that smell carries is to think of the cinnamon roll shops located in malls or airports.
The aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls draws consumers in to purchase. While some smells work to your benefit, others that are too overpowering can repel consumers. Consider the consumers who avoid the fragrance section of department stores because of the overpowering odour.
Sound: Sound, in the form of music and speech, can capture consumers’ attention quickly. Research has shown a positive connection between the use of popular songs in ads and consumers’ ability to recall those ads. It’s also proven that consumers react to what they hear in stores. Pleasant music results in increased store sales, and unpleasant noise results in lower store sales. In order to use sound to enhance consumers’ perceptions, consider your target market and what sounds appeal to them. If your business is a book store, classical music may encourage concentration. On the other hand, if your business is a clothing store for teenagers, you’ll likely want to focus on popular music those appeals to them.
Feel: When a consumer can touch and feel a product, she obtains vital information that can have a positive or negative effect. Consider a pillow, for example. As the consumer touches and feels the pillow, its softness may remind her of the way her grandmother’s pillows used to feel. This creates a pleasant perception and moves the consumer to purchase the pillow. However, the reverse also can happen. I may touch the pillow and be reminded Of the itchy sweater my mother used to make me wear.
This creates a negative perception that results in me not wanting to purchase the pillow. You don’t have control over negative perceptions for any of the previous stimuli. You just can’t please everyone. What you can do, however, is asking the consumers what they don’t like about the product you have shown them, and then point them in the direction of different products that will hopefully produce a positive perception. In other words, try to find out why the product triggers a red light for them. That way you can move them on to something that will trigger a green light.
Structural or external stimuli
Structural characteristics that affect a consumer’s perceptions are external, not internal. They deal less with the consumer’s senses, and yet they rely on visual elements to gain the consumer’s attention. Here are the structural stimuli that you might use:
Intensity and size: These characteristics often are the first things to attract the consumer’s attention. Intensity refers to the number of times consumers see your product or advertisement. You can gain consumers’ attention by creating an advertisement that’s brighter and larger in size than average advertisements. An example would be a full-page newspaper ad.
If you have a retail location and want to use intensity and size to your benefit in that location, consider the number of places you put your product and the sizes of the displays that house your products. If you Place one display at the entrance of your store and then another one where a customer might check out, you have not only increased the number of times your product is seen, but you’ve created the perception that the product is important enough for you to put it in more than one place.
Position: Whether a consumer sees an advertisement or product depends largely on where it’s positioned. This includes where an ad is placed on a newspaper page or where a product sits on the shelf.
Contrast: When you employ contrast, you set off one thing against another. Consider grabbing a consumer’s attention by placing a black and-white advertisement in a colorful publication or creating a commercial that plays softly during a television rock show. Placing an element where consumers don’t expect to see it attracts attention. You don’t always have to be the most colorful or the loudest; sometimes the contrast alone attracts more attention than the norm. In a retail setting, consider the colors you use in the displays that house your products. Also use lighting to really enhance and draw attention to your product. The objective is to make it stand out from among the other products available.
Novelty: Most people love novelty, whether the uniqueness is a new look, sound, taste, smell, or feel. Your child may choose a particular candy because of the novelty packaging; he’s not especially concerned with what’s inside. Consumers don’t necessarily buy items because they’re the least expensive either — most of the time they aren’t. They buy the items because they’re different and stand out.
Repetition: Repetition works. Advertisements often are repeated to help consumers recall a product and create a strong interest in that product. You hope that the desire created by the ad translates into a sale. Repetition works extremely well with lowinvolvement purchases, which are purchases that are less involved and carry a lower expenditure and less personal risk. Examples of these products are shampoo, toothpaste, or laundry detergent. Because consumers use these products every day and they typically don’t cost much, consumers are more willing to take a risk in trying them out.
When they see an advertisement that interests them or that sticks in their minds due to the repetition, they will often take mental note so that when they’re standing in the aisle to purchase the product, they recall your advertisement and choose to try it. Knowing which stimulus is right for you depend on your target market. Market research and testing of the different structural stimuli for your specific product allows you to see which one works for your product. You also can watch competitors to see what they’re doing and then glean ideas from the information.
STAGE 2: SENSORY RECEPTORS
Sensory receptors convert this energy into neural impulses and send them to the brain’ Where Person encodes such signal and understands those.
STEP 3: ENCODING AND SIMPLIFICATION
Next step in the process of perception is Encoding and Simplification. It is a process in which an individual organizes the information which they have selected and then they interpret that information in an understandable way. Encoding and Simplification also consider stereotypes behaviour, self- fulfilling prophecy, attribution theory, etc. According to Hilton and Vop Hipple, “Stereotypes” is a belief about the behaviour and characteristics of people who belongs to a particular group. For example, in a group of old men’s, all individuals have same characteristics.
There is a process of stereotyping In which a person divides different people in groups. They form groups of those individuals who are having the same qualities or characteristics. Then they outline the expectations of the group members. On the basis of, what people in that group are expecting
they interpreted their behaviour, according to our perception? Then there is stereotype maintenance, in this a perceiver analysis that whether they have perceived anything beyond the behaviour or not, according to their stereotypes and if they have perceived then they will correct it.
There are some causes and consequences of a stereotyping. Sometimes the behaviour of an individual group member, may not match the behaviour of the rest of the group then in that case our perception becomes wrong. Other one is that, there is a lack of motivation in the perceiver to make sure that whatever he/she has perceived about that particular group is correct. Another consequence of stereotypes is that there is confusion in communication within the group members because of which the perception becomes wrong.
STEP 4: STORAGE AND RETENTION
This is the fourth stages of perception in consumer behavior. Storage and retention of data will also help marketer in development of strategies. Perception of the consumer helps marketer in assessing the buyer buying behaviour while purchasing. Observation and understanding of consumer behaviour helps marketer to decide how individual will react or response in particular situation. This will leads to implementing strategies efficiently and effectively.
In this step marketer observe the behaviour at the time of buying. All observations are stored for the events which will occur in the future, so that an individual can use these Observations and interpretations and then relate the things with that particular situation. While interoperating a perceiver uses the stored observations and information to relate it with Physical characteristics, like emotional status, behaviour and other qualities of an individual.
The memory process may be controlled by the individual or may be automatic. The memory Process consist rehearsal, coding, transfer, placement, retrieval, and response generation. The Placement of information in long-term memory has significant implications in the memory process.
STEP 5: RETRIEVAL AND RESPONSE
The last stages of perception in consumer behavior is Retrieval and Response. The perception of Perceiver on the basis of observations, understandings and interpretations helps in making decisions. The Judgments of the perceiver’s always influenced by his perception. Now on the basis Of his perception, perceiver implements strategies/decision to achieve goals. Each step of Process of perception is helping the perceiver in performing different roles.
Perception helps a marketer in retrieving all information in advance like facts and figures, motive, purpose for doing project, expected result, etc. The retrieval of information from memory is a critical part of the memory process. If the process used for coding, transfer, and placement cannot be reestablished, the ability to access an item in long-term memory may be seriously limited.
On the other hand, forgetting is not related to the loss of information in long-term memory but to the failure of the retrieval process. Thus, remembering may be viewed as a constructive process and, as such, may be subject to distortion since items stored in long-term memory are not stored exactly as they were entered and completely recalled when desired.