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The Consumer Perception Process
by
Charles Lamson
Perception is everything. It guides all our activities from the people we associate with to the products we buy. How a consumer perceives each of the different brands in a category determines which ones he or she uses. The perception challenge, therefore, is the first and greatest hurdle advertisers must cross. Some marketers spend millions of dollars on national advertising, sales promotion, point-of-purchase displays, and other marketing communications only to discover that many consumers do not remember the product or the promotion. The average adult may be exposed to thousands of ads each day but notices only a handful and remembers even fewer. How does this happen? The answer lies in the principal of perception.
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We use the term perception to refer to the personalized way we sense, interpret, and comprehend various stimuli. This definition suggests there are several key elements to the consumer perception process.
Stimulus
A stimulus is physical information we receive through our senses. When we look at a new car, we receive a number of stimuli. We might note the color of the paint, the smell of the leather, the purr of the engine. When we look at a theater ad in the newspaper, we see a collection of type, art, and photography arranged in a way that we interpret as an ad. That is the stimulus. So, for our purposes, assume that a stimulus is any ad, commercial, or promotion that we see.
Advertising stimuli can appear in a variety of forms: a window display at a local department store; the brightly colored labels on cans of Campbell's tomato soup, or even the red price tag on a pair of skis at the Sport Chalet. These objects are all physical in nature; they stimulate our senses (with varying degrees of intensity) in ways that can be measured.
Perceptual Screens
The second key element in perception is the personalized way of seeing and interpreting the stimulus data. Before any data can be perceived, they must first penetrate a set of perceptual screens, the subconscious filters that shield us from unwanted messages. There are two types of screens, physiological and psychological.
The physiological screens comprise the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. They detect the incoming data and measure the dimension and intensity of the physical stimuli. A sight-impaired person cannot read an ad in Sports Illustrated. And if the type in a movie ad is too small for the average reader, it will not be read, and perception will suffer. Similarly, if the music in a TV commercial for a furniture store is not complementary to the message, the viewer may tune out, change channels or even turn off the TV. The advertiser's message is effectively screened out when the viewer cannot interpret it; perception does not occur, and the furniture goes unsold.
We are limited not only by the physical capacity of our senses but also by our feelings and interests. Each consumer uses psychological screens to evaluate, filter, and personalize information according to subjective emotional standards. These screens evaluate data based on innate factors, such as the consumer's personality and instinctive human needs, and learned factors, such as self-concept, interests, attitudes, beliefs, past experiences, and lifestyle. They help consumers summarize unwieldy or complex data.
After extensive consumer research, Bally's Health & Tennis determined that the perfectly chiseled body, glorified by earlier health club advertising and exemplified by such icons as Cher, Victoria Principal, and Don Johnson, was no longer penetrating the psychological screens of its 4.5 million members. As the new millenium approached, that premise no longer fit their self-concept (the image we have of who we are and who we want to be). In a major strategy shift, Bally's refocused its advertising on customers such as Beth from Costa Mesa, California, who is seen rock climbing in a TV commercial while telling viewers, "I think I climb because I'm afraid of heights. . . . There is nothing better than being able to conquer that fear. That's why I work out at Bally's, so I can do more on the rocks." The tagline: "If you can get here [Bally's], you can get there [a mountain]."
As this example shows, advertisers face a major problem dealing with consumers' perceptual screens. As overcommunicated consumers, we unconsciously screen out or modify many of the sensations that bombard us, rejecting those that conflict with our experiences, needs, desires, attitudes, and beliefs. We simply focus on some things and ignore others. This is called selective perception. Hence, Panasonic may run a series of outstanding ads for its new digital camcorder in the daily newspaper, but they will not penetrate the psychological screens of consumers who do not need or want a new camera. Later these people probably will not even remember seeing the ads.
Cognition
The third key element in perception is cognition: comprehending the stimulus. Once we detect the stimulus and allow it through our perpetual screens, we can comprehend and accept it. Now perception has occurred, and the stimulus reaches the consumer's reality zone.
But each of us has his or her own reality. For example, you may consider the tacos advertised by Taco Bell to be '"Mexican" food. That perception is your reality. But someone from Mexico might tell you that a fast-food taco bears little resemblance to an authentic Mexican taco. That person's reality, based on another perception, is considerably different. Advertisers thus seek commonly shared perceptions of reality as a basis for their advertising messages.
Mental Files
The mind is like a memory bank, and the stored memories in our minds are called the mental (or perceptual) files.
Just as stimuli bombard our senses, information crowds our mental files in today's overcommunicative society. To cope with the complexity of stimuli such as advertising, we rank products and other data in our files by importance, price, quality, features, or a host of other descriptors. Consumers can rarely hold more than seven brand names in any one file---more often only one or two. The remainder either get discarded to some other file category or rejected altogether. How many brands of running shoes can you quickly name, for example?
Because of our limited memory, we resist opening new mental files, and we avoid accepting new information inconsistent with what is already filed. The experience consumers receive from using a brand solidifies their perceptions of it. These fixed perceptions can rarely be changed through advertising alone. But once a new perception does enter our mental files, the information alters the database on which our psychological screens feed.
Because perceptual screens are such a major challenge to advertisers, it is important to understand what is in the consumer's mental files and, if possible, modify them in favor of the advertiser's product. That brings us to the second process in consumer behavior: learning and persuasion, which will be discussed in the next post.
To be continued. . . .
*SOURCE: CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING 11TH ED., 2008, WILLIAM F. ARENS, MICHAEL F. WEIGOLD, CHRISTIAN ARENS, PGS. 147-149*
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