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/