Segmentation...

Dividing people into groups is a basic marketing process. This sentence might be a conclusion of friday’s lecture. It is professionally called SEGMENTATION. According to Smith (1957) is based on the observation of evolution of demand and represents a more precise and rational adaptation of the product and the marketing effort to meet customer or user demands. But I prefer simpler definition, as Ruth said it was finding out what different groups of people wantsAs we know marketers use tricks to find out many pieces of information about the customers.
The most often we are not even aware of the fact that we make our private data accessible with someone who can use it to gain its own objectives. People usually agree to fill in many anonymous questionnaires, which can be useful in creating customer profiles. There are many different profiles connected with age, gender, social class and even a hair colour. Next part of the lecture was as interesting as the previous one. We got to know that in Victorian times people needed only one product to clean floors, washing hair and children’s mouth. What is interesting, today, we do not need anything more than one product to clean. But we live in advertising and marketing era. Specialists can manipulate our brains and convince us that every single person need something different that others. As a result, we can find on the shelves thousands of hair products which are not necessary for us. It is only an artificial division created to gain profits from selling. Do we really think that women’s hair are different than men’s? No! But marketing experts attached us to this division.
Dividing people due to their gender is a great example of a process called STP marketing which helps to indicate a position of a product in market.
After a piece of theory we had a chance to use our knowledge in practice. We got three receipts from the biggest supermarkets. Our challenge was to recognize and draw a profile of a
person who bought products. I expected that I might be difficult but it was not. All groups were close to the truth.
To sum up, I enclose two relevant articles and a few photos and diagrams which can help you to understand a topic which I was writing about.

Perception, closure, illussion....

Understanding the customer seems to be the most interesting module during my studies. As I had written before it is about consumer psychology and being aware of differences between people. At today’s lecture we talked about perception, which is the process of sensing, selecting & interpreting consumer stimuli in the external world” (Wilkie 1994) and according to the easier definition:"… is how we see the world around us” (Schiffman & Kanuk 2003). As we know people can use five senses: sight, hearning, taste, touch and smell to contact with world around us. PR and advertising specialists know about that and they try to influence on our mind. Many tricks are used to convince the customer that one product is better than other. Specialist's main purpose is to make and advert recognizable and rememberable. There are many examples of such adverts. Pictures show a few of them.

During today's classes we have made four experiments which disclosed a secret that we are not always able to recognize products if it is not in an original packaging and that we were not aware of the fact that we choose products intuitionally....

Kerry and Louise worked out an experiment connected with chocolate. They brought three bars of chocolate produced by different companies. We must have tried every single chunk and decided which one is produced by Cadbury, Galaxy etc. That experiment showed that English students are used to this brands and it wasn't difficult for them to recognize.

Second test was about Coke. Sally and Frankie signed glasses A and B. Every single person had to decide whether they drink coke/pepsi/coke light. Only one person (Shaun) recognize everything perfectly. The rest of a group had big problems with recognition. It proved that people are often attached to favorite brands, without being aware of real taste. Packaging is more important for them.

Everyone can ask why it is so important to PR and Marketing students? Answer is easy. In the future, we are going to be a part of a big advertising or PR agency. Working is such places is strongly connected with understanding peoples behavior and complicity of buying process.

Article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/

Perception - Gestalt...

It is commonly known that our own vision about the world is based on five basic senses such as: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing but it is also an additional one: kinesthetic sense which informs us of the position of our body and movements of parts of the body (Cassels, 1991). The process of creation our vision is called perception. According to Anette Cassels book(1991): Perception involves the taking in of information, through our senses, and then processing that information to make meaningful sense of it all. Many scientist have been doing researches about that topic since ancient times. They were aware of human’s brain complicity. In late 1930s a group o psychologist called Gestalt raised many questions about the most known type of perception – visual. Wertheimer, Koffka and Koehler proved that people use number of principles to by which they organize isolated part of a stimulus into groups or whole objects. These are: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and common fate.

Quoting http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~kbroom/Lectures/gestalt.htm website:

Proximity:

The principle of proximity or contiguity states that things which are closer together will be seen as belonging together.

Similarity:

Similarity means there is a tendency to see groups which have the same characteristics so in this example, there are three groups of black squares and three groups of white squares arranged in lines.

The principle of similarity states that things which share visual characteristics such as shape, size, color, texture, value or orientation will be seen as belonging together.

Continuity:

The principle of continuity predicts the preference for continuous figures. We perceive the figure as two crossed lines instead of 4 lines meeting at the center.

Closure:

Related to principle of good continuation, there is a tendency to close simple figures, independent of continuity or similarity. This results in a effect of filling in missing information or organizing information which is present to make a whole

Common fate:

Suppose both principles of proximity and similarity are in place - then a movement takes place - the dots begin to move down the page. They appear to change grouping.

A few other examples of visual perception:

Difficult start.....

You can’t even imagine how difficult is foreigners’ life here – in the UK. I’ve been in England for two weeks and now I know what does it mean to be completely lost in a strange country. Everything is new for me here. I hope that I get used to it…
But, to be honest, this blog is not about my complaints, it’s about my new student’s life at Chalfont Campus! Few months ago I’ve chosen the PR&Marketing course at Bucks New University. Now, after a week, I can say that I has been the best possible choice which I’ve ever made. Everyday is different than another. Interesting lectures, nice teachers and wonderful atmosphere. Every single group has it’s own tutor. My tutor is Ruth. She is also a “understanding the customer” teacher. I personally believe that it is an important subject of PR education connected with consumer’s psychology. We can get to know much about people’s behavior and their way of thinking. During first lecture(?) we had a chance to find out more about each other in a group. Everyone brought a thing which shows their personality perfectly. What is more, now I know that first impression is the most important part of marketing and that first 30sec. in contact with the customer can decide whether he will be satisfied with cooperation or not.
Is that all what I wanted to write? Yes, I think that it is enough for the beginning…..

(I want to apologize, everyone who have to read this blog, for my English, but I hope that a year in the UK can help me to develop my language skills.)