Perception process Flashcards
- SOR theory/paradigm - PAD model
What is environmental psychological in a retail setting?
Environmental psychology is concerned with studying the link environment – behaviour.
- Applied to the design of retail and service environments.
- Based on the principles of classical conditioning: Stimulus and response.
What is the perceptual process?
- Perception – The process of receiving, selecting and interpreting environmental stimuli involving the five senses (Kardes, Cline and Cronley, 2011).
- Make sense of the environment around us.
- Subjectivity and phenomenal absolutism.
Order of the diagram: - Sensory exposure (stimulus): Sight, hearing etc
- Attention
- Comprehension
The other diagram: - Sensory stimuli e.g sights–> Sensory receptors e.g eyes
The order is exposure, attention, interpretation and then response. The first 2 are the sensation and the last two is the meaning.
What is exposure in a marketing/consumption context?
- Exposure – media messages, branding, commercial and other forms of advertisement.
- Brands – focus on the fact that with higher degree of exposure, at some point their message is going to “stick” and capture consumers’ attention.
What are the sensory thresholds?
Absolute threshold: The minimum amount of stimulation that can be detected on a given sensory channel e.g a dog whistle.
What is differential threshold?
- The ability of a sensory system to detect changes or differences between two stimuli.
- Example: packaging updates must be subtle enough over time to keep current customers.
What is exposure?
“…reflects the process by which the consumer comes into contact with a stimulus.”
- Exposure occurs when a stimulus comes within range of someone’s sensory receptors
- We can concentrate, ignore, or completely miss stimuli
Marketing stimuli - factors influencing exposure
- Position of an ad
- Product distribution
- Shelf placement
What is attention?
Attention is the extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus.
- Marketers need to break through the clutter- competition for our attention.
- Sensory overload: consumers exposed to far more information than they can process.
Characteristics:
- Selective – we only focus on a few stimuli at a time.
- Capable of being divided and distracted.
- Limited - depends on familiarity and ease of processing of the stimuli.
- Habituation – decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations.
- Defines target segments.
- Younger consumers can multitask (or think they can multitask better than they can.
What is the role of the left and right hemisphere in attention?
Left hemisphere: Processing units that can be combined, e.g.,
✓ Counting
✓ Processing
unfamiliar words
✓ Forming sentences
Right hemisphere:
✓ Processing music
✓ Grasping
visual/spatial information
✓ Forming inferences
✓ Drawing conclusions
What are schemas?
- Schemas are both representations of knowledge and information processing mechanisms.
- Schemas entail images of objects and the relations among them.
- Different schemas are mentally applied in appropriate situations to help people to comprehend and interpret information.
- Many kinds of schemas: e.g., object schemas, person schemas, self schemas, event-schemas.
What is interpretation in relation to schemas?
- Interpretation refers to the meaning we assign to sensory stimuli, which is based on a schema or set of beliefs.
- Consumers use advertising to build schemas (i.e. set of beliefs)
- Advertising can cause consumers to develop false notions of what is considered normal, beautiful, attractive, etc. [Think about some brand and ad examples from Evolutionary Psychology lecture]
- Identifying and evoking the correct schema is crucial to many marketing decisions, because this determines what criteria will be used to evaluate the product, package, or message.
What is the organism part in SOR model?
Represents the internal psychological state of an individual, including their cognitive, emotional, and physiological reactions to a stimulus. e.g Schema
What is the response part of the SOR model? (Response taxonomy)
Physical approach & avoidance:
- Relates to store patronage at a basic level - desire to
stay (approach) or get out of (avoid) the environment.
Exploratory approach & avoidance:
- Relates to search behaviours - willingness to explore
(approach) vs. tendency to avoid interacting and moving through an environment.
Communication approach & avoidance:
- Relates to willingness to communicate and interact with others (sales personnel, other shoppers) or to ignore communication attempts from others (avoidance).
Performance & satisfaction approach and avoidance:
- Relates to degree of enhancement (approach) or hindrance (avoidance) of performance or satisfaction with task performances.
What is the Mehrabian - Russel model?
- Simple model of how people respond to retail environments
- Perception and interpretation of the environment influence how individuals feel in that environment.
Original: PAD (1974) - Modified: P-A (Russel and Prat, 1980; dominance - ‘too cognitive’). - It’s a more in depth model compared to SOR even though it uses the same initial components. The PAD model focuses on the Organism part.
What is the stimulus part? What is the organism part
- Environmental Stimuli & Cognitive Processes. Sense modalities & information rate (novelty and complexity)
- Emotional, Response, Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance. Individual personality traits.
- Response Behaviour: Approach/ Avoidance & Cognitive Processes.
What is pleasure? What is arousal? What is dominance?
- Pleasure: Degree to which a person feels good, joyful, happy or satisfied with a particular situation.
- Arousal: Feelings of excitement, stimulation, alertness or activeness to feelings of being tired, sleepy or bored.
- Dominance: The extent to which an individual feels in control of or free to act in a particular situation (controlling vs. controlled; dominant vs. submissive; influential vs. influenced).
How can arousal link to environmental psychology?
Arousal can increase time spent in store and willingness to interact with sales personnel (Donovan and Rossiter, 1982).
- Pleasure and arousal predict actual purchase, not only intentions (Donovan et al., 1994)
- Intensify arousal by adding upbeat music, bright colours.
- Retailers should attempt to dampen arousal if their environment is perceived as unpleasant (e.g. private medical centre).
Visual – colour and lighting:
- Warm colours - elated mood states and arousal; can also increase anxiety
- Cool colours - reduce arousal; can elicit peacefulness and calm.
- Harsh bright lighting - increases arousal but decreases pleasure, and communicates brand image (Bellizzi and Hite, 1991; Middlestadt, 1990; Summers and Herbert, 2001).
How can auditory be applied to environmental psychology?
Music – can increase arousal which influences:
- Purchase intention
- Perception of time passed
- Actual time passed (flow)
- Product and store evaluations (Linsen, 1975; Milliman, 1982)
- Slow music – slow eating
- Slow music – higher beverage income (Milliman, 1986)
How can olfactory (scent) be applied to environmental psychology?
- Strong impact on mood, affect & evaluative responses, purchase intention & in-store behavior (Spangenberg et al., 1996).
- Mood (Baron 1990; Mitchell et al., 1995) → Increasing purchase, browsing & loyalty.
- Gamblers spend more money on slot machines when the casino is pleasantly scented (Hirsch, 1995).
What did Spangenberg et al. (2003) find out about olfactory?
- Spangenberg et al. (2003) found that pleasant ambient scents can fail to have the desired effect if they are incongruent with consumers’ expectations or preferences regarding a retail store and its merchandise.
- To be successful, olfactory cues should be pleasant and also ought to “fit” with other components of the environment into which they are diffused.
- Consistency between an ambient scent and music in a retail setting leads to more favourable evaluations of the store, its merchandise and the store environment Spangenberg et al. (2005).
What did Ambient scent (Madzharov et al., 2015) find out about olfactory?
- A warm (vs. cool) ambient scent leads people to perceive the environment around them as more (vs. less) socially dense.
- As a result people experience a reduced sense of power and, thus, engage in power compensatory behaviour manifested as increased preference for premium brands and products.
How can the tactile/Haptic sense be applied to environmental psychology?
- Is the most basic of senses; we learn this before vision and smell.
- Affects product experience and judgment
- Research found that participants who touch an item for 30 seconds or less had a greater level of attachment with the product.
- Touch in service encounters impacts on consumers’ evaluations of service providers (Sundaram and Webster, 2000).
How does Olfactory + auditory link to environmental psychology?
- Match between the arousal caused by store scent and the background music → increased impulse buying and satisfaction.
- E.g. low arousal scent (lavender) combined with slow tempo music and high arousal scent (grapefruit) with fast tempo music.
