Consumer Perception Process
————————————————- Consumer Behaviour ————————————————- Consumer Behaviour Dropbox assignment 1 Teacher: Mr. Perry Broome Duncan Cijsouw (0617745) 10/05/2011 Dropbox assignment 1 Teacher: Mr. Perry Broome Duncan Cijsouw (0617745) 10/05/2011 Consumer perception process Part 1a This is about the way consumers perceive a product or a brand. This recognition of a product or brand is based on two different things: Learning and Perception. These two phrases mean something completely different, but are in fact closely connected when it comes to consumer perception.
Learning Learning is a change in behavior from the interaction between a person and a stimulus. This can be intentional or unintentional. The difference between this is that intentional learning, on the one hand, means that the consumer is set out to learn information devoted to a certain subject. The learning is acquired by a search for information. For example when I bought a new snowboard last year. Instead of buying a random board, I first did a lot of research about which one would be best for me. I was intentionally learning about the differences in snowboards.
Unintentional learning, on the other hand, is about how consumers sense and react to the environment. The learning is acquired without much effort. People will react differently to influences from their environment and will create a preference to certain brands or products. For example, we may experience the sales people in one store being nicer to us than those in the other. We thus may develop a preference for the one store over the other; however, if pressed, we may not be able to give a conscious explanation as to the reason for our preference.
Or as shown in the example above an attractive woman in a car can give a positive effect which might persuade the customer to buy the car more easily. Perception Perception is a consumer’s awareness and interpretation of reality. Everyday an average person sees around 2000 advertisements a day, but can only remember a few of them. This is because they are not really interested in most of these products anyways. But for example, if you are looking to buy a new car, you will probably pay more attention to car advertisements. This is called selective attention.
A brand can also change its positioning strategy this way by changing their advertising campaigns a bit. The change is most of the time barely noticeable for consumers but unintentionally they will have a different image of the brand and will be more likely to buy it. An example I found about this is the advertising campaign of Marlboro in the 1950’s. Around 1950 Marlboro introduced filtered cigarettes. The sales of these cigarettes were pretty low because customers thought they were feminine and because of this very few males bought them.
By launching an advertisement campaign showing tough cowboys smoking Marlboro filtered cigarettes they positioned themselves in the heads of their customers as a manlier brand again, which lead to a sales increase of 300% from $5 billion in 1955 to $20 billion in 1957. They changed the customer’s perception of the brand by only changing the picture on their advertisements. This can also lead to a mere exposure effect. Brands that you have been exposed will most of the time be preferred over brands that you do not know yet. This could lead to unethical acts though.
This is because people will more easily buy products from brands that they know. An example is chicken nuggets from McDonalds. Customers do not really want to know how these are made because they just want to keep buying them for the taste, not the product information. But this doesn’t count for all kinds of products in my opinion. If customers want to buy a fur coat they can just as well buy a fake version instead. It’s most of the time cheaper and they know that animals haven’t been killed to make them. Facebook ‘likes’ influence consumers’ brand perception: Ipsos study Chris Powell, July 21, 2011
Forget the power of love. In this era of social media, all it takes is the power of “like” to foster brand interest. A recent poll by Vancouver-based Ipsos Loyalty has found that nearly half (49%) of Canadians say they are either strongly or somewhat influenced by brand or product recommendations made by members of their online social network. The findings are based on an online survey of 844 Canadians conducted in the first quarter of 2011. Not surprisingly, the influence of social network recommendations is significantly stronger for online Canadians 18-34 (56%) than it is for older online Canadians 55+ (40%).
The study also found that 48% of online Canadians using an online social network “follow” or “like” a minimum of one brand. Nearly 60% of younger Canadians follow at least one brand and an average of five, while only 30% of older Canadians follow a brand, and are likely to follow just one. “These results show that social networks influence impressions and ultimately the bottom line,” said Ipsos Loyalty vice-president Dave Pierzchala in a release. Online relationships with brands are also likely to be tenuous, with 28% of Canadians saying they have “unliked” or stopped “following” a brand or company.
Younger Canadians are particularly fickle, with 41% having “unliked” a company (compared with just 15% of older Canadians). The primary reason (55%) given for “unliking”: the consumer simply lost interest. “Brands and products cannot assume that once a consumer befriends their organization that they will be friends for life,” said Pierzchala. “To be successful, organizations must work on their virtual relationships as hard as they work on their face-to-face ones. ” Part 1b Facebook ‘likes’ influence consumers’ brand perception: Ipsos study Author: Chris Powell Date: July 21, 2001 Pages: 1 Summary
This is just a short article about customer perception, but it clearly defines how social media is another source of influencing customer’s perception of a brand. It states that an experiment has been done to show the effects that social media has on customer’s brand interest. It compares the difference in influence that Facebook has on the younger users (18-34 years old) compared to the older ones (55+ years old). I think this article is written to businesses that try to target a younger target group, because this article shows that it clearly has advantages to advertise online on sites like Facebook.
I agree completely with this author. On Facebook it is very easy to ‘Like’ a page, and from personal experience I know that it is much easier to stay with a certain brand if you ‘like’ it or, if a lot of your friends ‘like’ something, it is easy to be persuaded to buy this brand too. He says that brands should work on their virtual relationships as hard as on their face-to-face ones. This is a good point because of the huge amount of Facebook users nowadays. Sales promotions can also be done online. If you for example ‘like’ a page you can print out a coupon to bring to a store for a discount on your purchase.
Part 1c To make good use of the consumer perception process you will need to make sure you get plenty of brand awareness. This can be achieved in an expensive way by making a lot of advertising campaigns and commercials, but by using the social media it is much easier to reach a bigger audience for much less money. If people get acquainted with your product you can add certain characteristics to it that only your product has. People will start recognizing your brand by seeing only a few things they’re familiar with. An example is Coca Cola.
The shape and color of their bottles is so familiar that people notice it very quickly and sometimes not even intentional. They perceive this as a good quality brand and will be more tempted to buy these products. Another example is Tim Hortons in Canada. This brand is well-known for its good quality coffee for a quite low price. If you want to start a Tim Hortons in the Netherlands though, it will be much harder to be as successful as here in Canada. Most customers will not have heard about this brand before and will probably just stick with their own coffee.
They will probably not pay much attention to advertisements Tim Hortons spreads. This is because their perception of the brand will probably be that it’s just another company selling coffee which might not seem so special to them. If they can increase their brand awareness by a big advertisement campaign and use social media like Facebook in the Netherlands, the consumer perception of this company might increase, and in that case they could be successful. Part 2 Consumption log, October 4th, 2011 Items purchased| 9|
Number of times I made purchases| 5| Total amount spent| $23| Number of times I ate| 4| Number of places I consumed food| 4| Number of liquids I consumed| 8| Number of other goods consumed| 7| Number of times I recycled goods| 3| Number of times I disposed of goods| 5| Number of times I disposed of goods away from home| 3| My activities that day: Before I went to class I stopped at Oasis to get a bagel and coffee for breakfast. After 4 hours of classes I went to get some lunch. I bought a second coffee and got a slice of pizza at Pizza Pizza.
The rest of the afternoon I didn’t have to purchase much because I still had plenty of snacks and drinks at home. For dinner I had a steak at the Outback Shack and 2 beers, and I ended the evening with drinking another two beers at an open mic in a sportsbar. My total costs for the day were around $23 dollar. This pattern represents an average day for me at college here. Some days I will eat more than 4 times a day, some days I eat less. The amount spent varies as well relying on if I buy my food at one of the restaurants here or if I cook for myself.
Normally I don’t drink beer on Tuesdays though but it had hedonic value to me over a coke for having a good night as I was free the next day. I quite often buy things with hedonic value rather than utilitarian value. An example is the steak I bought at the Outback Shack. I could also just have made a cheap meal at home, but instead of that I was really craving for a steak, so I was willing to spend a bit extra on that. Furthermore, I? m currently looking to buy a new netbook, which means I pay closer attention to advertisements that offer netbooks for a special price.
Especially certain brands like Asus catch my attention because I perceive that brand as always making high quality laptops. I am planning to change my consumer behavior a bit, because of the fact that my mealplan is running out of money quite fast. This means I will have to cook more food myself rather than buying it at a restaurant. The food will therefore have more utilitarian value to me than hedonic. For the rest I think I won’t change my consumer behavior too much though because I like it the way it is.
