Attention and Perception Flashcards
Attention
- Attention: the amount of mental energy or effort that we allocate to stimuli.
- Attention is selective!
“The power of marketing is eroding […] from lack of attention”.
The bottleneck in Information Processing
Case Study – Cycling Safety - Objectives
Objective: Reduce bicycle casualties in London with rather small budget (600k pounds) without putting people off cycling.
Couldn’t just tell people that cyclists weren’t being noticed – Had to prove it!
Did not use fear appeals because:
- People have become desensitized to this type of advertising;
- Would people off cycling in London, which was not the aim;
- Did not want to place blame on either party (drivers vs. cyclists).
Case Study – Cycling Safety - Method
Used vision science instead;
Inattentional blindness: Psychological lack of attention - Not associated with any vision defects or deficits; Individuals fail to see objects or stimuli that are unexpected and quite often salient.
- Used a scientific, persuasive reason why everybody needs to work much harder to ensure the safety of cyclists;
Part of our eyes capable of picking up sharp detail is very small: about size of 50p coin held by one’s outstretched arm! Rest is peripheral vision.
- Urged drivers to see and cyclists to be seen to compensate the limitations of our brain.
Case Study – Cycling Safety - Results
Test experienced by 13 million people.
- High impact campaign: Over 30000 click-throughs to cycling safety page of tfl website; over 23000 people sent film to a friend.
- Desire for change – Those who recognized the ad significantly more likely to indicate change future change in behavior.
- Fatalities on London roads dropped by a third (January-June 2008 vs. Jan-June 2007), despite total number of cycling trips in London having increased by 24%.
Change blindness
We often miss large changes to our visual world from one view to the next.
We often miss these changes, even though they are obvious to someone who knows that they are going to happen!
How can marketers attract consumers’ attention?
- Interactivity
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Novelty
- Feelings of surprise due to “schema discrepancy”
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Ambiguity/ Participation
- The message needs some (however small) mental effort to solve the puzzle.
- Humour
- Reduces counter-arguments.
- Should not distract consumer attention away from the brand!
How can we measure attention?
An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement.
“Instead of asking people to recall their reactions or describe their cognitive engagement, eye tracking lets you objectively measure it.”
Joceline Lu, Center for Retailing, Stockholm School of Economics
Attention Capture and Transfer in Advertising
- Bottom-up factors are features of advertisements that determine perceptual salience, such as size and shape. Capture attention to ad elements rapidly and almost automatically.
- Top-down factors reside in the person and their attentional process, e.g. Involvement with products or familiarity with brands. Encourage subjects to voluntarily pay attention to ads.
Attention Capture and Transfer in Advertising
Key findings of eye-tracking study:
- The text element best captures attention in direct proportion to its surface size.
- The brand element most effectively transfers attention to the other elements.
- The pictorial is superior in capturing attention, independent of its size – Implication?
Directing Attention in Advertising
Eye-tracking Study - Attraction of a face (106 respondents).
- Attention can be directed according to the subject’s focal point (Warmer colours represent longer viewing behaviours).
What happens when the baby is looking to the side?
Eye-tracking study
The business issue: The next time you are in a big supermarket take a look at the breakfast cereals and try to count them. We have so much choice, so many sub-categories and so many promotions that it would take the average person hours to evaluate them all. Many people just default to buying what they always buy.
- Study with shoppers wearing eye-tracking glasses
- Eye tracking showed Weetabix and Alpen were hard to find on shelves
- Outcome of the research: simplicity strategy!
Sensation and Perception:
Sensation: Immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers…) to stimuli such as light, color, sound, odor and texture.
Perception: Awareness and interpretation of sensory information (what we add to these raw sensations to give them meaning).
Visual Illusions
Colour perception - Purple
combines the calm stability of blue and the fierce energy of red. The color purple is often associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. Purple also represents extravagance, creativity, wisdom, and magic. It is a rare occurring color in nature and as a result is often seen as having sacred meaning.
Colour perception - Red
Red, the color of blood and fire, is associated with meanings of love, passion, desire, heat, sexuality, sensitivity, romance, courage, vigor, willpower, rage, anger, danger, stress, action, and determination.
Studies show that the color red can create physical effects such as elevated blood pressure, enhanced libido, increased respiratory rates, enhanced metabolism, increased enthusiasm, higher levels of energy, and increased confidence.
The color red is a highly visible color that is able to focus attention quickly and get people to make quick decisions.
In China, red symbolizes Health, wealth, good fortune, happiness
Colour perception - Blue
Blue is seen as trustworthy , dependable, and commited. The colour of ocean and sky, blue is a constant and calming influence in our world. Blue has equal appeal to men and women.
When United Airlines took over Pan Am’s Pacific routes and initiated a new first-class service out of Hong Kong, the company gave white carnations to passengers.
What was the problem?
White is strongly associated with death and misfortune in that region!
Touch:
Fragrance and cosmetics containers tend to speak to consumers via their tactile appeal.
Why most modern perfume bottles are still made of glass? Because when women handle an elegantly sculpted glass container they experience a sense of luxury that most modern materials can’t provide
- Individuals vary on their ‘Need for Touch’.
Example of questions of the ‘Need for Touch’ scale (Peck and Childers, 2003):
- When walking through stores I can’t help touching all kinds of products.
- Touching products can be fun.
- I feel more comfortable purchasing a product after physically examining it.
Sensory thresholds and illusions: Differential threshold
Ability of a sensory system to detect changes in or differences between two stimuli;
Just noticeable difference: Minimum difference we can detect between two stimuli.
Weber’s law:
The stronger the initial stimulus, the greater the additional intensity needed for the second stimulus to be perceived as different.
Delboeuf Illusion:
The more “white space” around the circle, the smaller it appears.
Implications for food consumption?
- Participants given larger bowls served & consumed 16% more cereal than those given smaller bowls.
- Estimates of their cereal consumption were 7% lower than estimates of the group with smaller bowls!
What can be done about this to encourage healthy food consumption?
- Healthy foods such as fresh vegetables should be served in larger plates to encourage consumption;
- Less healthy foods in smaller plates.
Elongation effect:
Consumption of juice rose by 19% when subjects used a short, wide glass vs. a tall, thin glass.
Effect was stronger in teenagers, who poured and drank 74% more juice in the short, wide glass condition.
“Vertical-horizontal illusion” - Human tendency to focus on heights more than widths!
Gestalt perception:
We register and encode stimuli as an overall configuration, without sensing the details.
This is called Gestalt perception, derived from the German word gestalt which means a general, overall image formed in the mind.
Perceptual Organisation: Perception is not isolated from the substantive element of a message
What sort of product or brand would have logotypes like each of the following four variants of KAZON?
The importance of context
- What do you think of this chair?
- Is it beautiful?
- Is it ugly?
- How much do you think it costs?
- Designer: Fernando and Humberto Campana, 2002
- Manufacturer: Edra, Italy
- Materials: Brazilian Pinus wood
- Price: $2,630
Figure and ground:
In any visual, something is the background (ground), and something is the focal object (figure).
Need to make sure that the dominant message remain the figure, rather than becoming the ground.
Perceptual Organization: Law of Closure
- Consumers enjoy ‘filling in the gap’ for themselves
- Used to involve consumers and promote retention of information.
BUT you need the components in order to make the message ‘whole’ and make sense of it.
Law of Proximity
States that we will see objects that are close together as forming a group.
Retailers tend to group together products that complement one another, such as tights near to shoes…
Law of Similarity:
Things that are similar to one another are perceived to be more related than those that are dissimilar.
