Perception continued (Week 3)

In week three we carried on with the theme of perception. To day the class was taken by the students in which we had different type of tests to test our own perceptions. According to Schiffman and Kanuk, 2003 perception is "how we see the world around us".the perception tests we under took consisted of a ….Coca cola test, Chocolate test and an advert backing track test.
The first test was the coca cola challenge this consisted of having three types of coca cola they were…
Coca cola
Coke zero
Diet coke

The aim of the challenge was to see weather people could really differentiate between the three main cokes and weather or not they really chose that specific coke because of its taste or weather it was to do with other outside factors. The results of the perception experiment was that people could easily distinguish the real coca cola but they found it harder to differentiate between the diet coke and the coke zero. This showed that people tend to go for the products by the way it is advertised and how the product is perceived to be among there friendship groups. If we was to do the experiment we would ask them to choose what one they would but just by looking at the labels and then ask them what one they would purchase due to the taste and see if they match up.
Another perception test which we did was the chocolate test in which we tasted the chocolate and saw weather the price of the chocolate determines the better tasting one. The out come of this test showed that generally cheaper the chocolate the worse tasting it was so that price did have an impact on the taste of the chocolate. We also did a test on auditory perception on which we had one advert shown with two different backing tracks, we then had to say how the backing track changed the adverts perceived target audience and the power that our sense of sound has when knowing who to target your product to.
The last thing we researched was Gestalt psychology this is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts.

here is a clip of samusng using optical illusions to advertise there new phone.

There are 4 main parts to Gestalt theory they are….
Grouping-is when we tend to associate a product with the surrounding products and we assume that they share the same characteristics.
Figure and ground-is where there is an image that catches you attention and the background is normally left plain so it doest distract from the image. Such as the Dove soap advert

However there is also time in which there are both distinguishable images both in the foreground and the background, this is good for catching the persons eye however they may miss the message being advertised .These are called optical illusions some examples are http://www.optillusions.com
Closure - We tend to see an incomplete picture as complete picture such as the elephant we see it as we think it should appear and it is not until we actually look at it we realise it is wrong. So how many legs does the elephant have?















Stimulus ambiguity - the stimulus is ambiguous if it does not automatically resemble a recognisable form. We need to find a context in order to interpret it. For example it is when a picture can be either or for example do you see the muscian or the girls face? http://www.optillusions.com/dp/1-9.htm

Perception (Week 2)

In this week we were learning about perception. To start this week off we first looked at Buyer behaviourBuyer behaviour consists of the buyers black box which is split in to to the buyers characteristics and the buyer decision process. There is also a stimuli which influences the buyer to purchase the products, there are two main stimuli the first is the marketing stimuli which consists of the 4p’s...price, place, product and promotion(this stimuli can be controlled).and the other stimuli consists of influences such as...
econimic,technological,political and social factors which cant be controlled by the company that is advertising. All of the before react upon the buyers response which consists of product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, retailer choice purchase timing, purchase frequency and purchase amount. http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/buying_stimulus_model.asp We also learned that there are five main thought processes that occur when it come to purchasing a good. These consist of
1.Need recognition
2.Information
3.Evaluate alternatives
4.Purchase decision
5.Post purchase behaviour
(Only when an impulse buy is made do these five factors not apply)
We also learned about the way in which the five main senses...

1.touch
2.taste
3.smell
4.sight
5.sound




each affecting our choice on what we purchase. We found out that we are perceptible to up to 2 million pieces of information per second and that the information gets filtered down to 134 of which we take notice of.







The way in which the sences are used are to attract a certain target audience is that the people doing the advertising use certain sounds and visual images that will then appeal to the target audience we also found out that an adverts target audience can change just by the backing track that accompanies the advert.

Introduction (Week1)

In lecture one we had our first encounter with what we would be studying for the rest of the course. The first exercise we looked at first appearances and how they affect our overall judgment on a person. To do this we had a volunteer stand at the front of the class whilst we made a judgement before she even spoke .then we justified our answers and found out that we had stereotyped her before we even knew her and that the stereotype was fairly accurate. This showed that subliminal messages were picked up by people with out them even thinking about it. We found out that the way in which people’s posture, the dress code and the accessories they wear have a big influence on the way we perceived the volunteer to be. After we then had were given object and told to build a character profile from that single object. in this group work it was interesting to see how a single object got people thinking about how it could represent them and relate to them, before we knew it the groups were had started stereotyping the work.
Later on in the class we were given an egg and told to write in the egg about us and this represented the fact that everyone is so diverse and unique that really stereotypes shouldn’t actually exist and that they are a way of companies to target a group of people and know who to advertise to.
We also did an exercise in which we learned about a theorist called Russell w Belk and his “We Are What We Have” theory which consists of both the me and mine theory (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~slaterj/dissertation2.htm) Not only are we what we are seen to be (the ‘me’ concept), we are also what is seen to be ours (the ‘mine’ concept).