WEEK 3 17TH October, 2008

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

In this session we carried out a number of experiments to test out perceived quality and peoples power of sensing things. We carried out a number of experiments which were smelling different kinds of shampoos of different makes, smelling different perfumes, eating chocolate without looking at it but by touching it and tasting it, we also tasted diet Pepsi and diet Coca cola by pouring them in the same cups and then tasting them.










The shampoo experiments results showed that mostly females have a very strong smelling sense as all of them could tell which one was a male shampoo as it is strong scented. The result on the chocolate experiment showed that gender does not matter but quality is important as all the people that tasted them stated that galaxy and Cadbury’s tasted better than the other one and were also aware of which one is the most expensive chocolate out of them all. They all stated that the cheap chocolate tasted horrible and they could tell it was cheap. I personally think that people can tell the quality of the product they eat which means these people would have a strong tasting sense. With the Coca cola and the Pepsi experiment the results were that almost everyone except one male found that Pepsi tasted better but actually stated that it was coke they tasted whereas the only male who was right stated that the product did taste better but was actually Pepsi. I think that Pepsi does taste better than coke but people tend to have a perception that Coke tastes better because of the brand name. At the same time you cannot tell the difference between the two by looking at them as they look exactly the same.

COKE VS PEPSI

WEEK 2 10TH October, 2008

PERCEPTION

In this lesson we learned about perception. Perception is the process of sensing, selecting and interpreting consumer stimuli in the external world (Wilkie 1994). It is also how we see the world around us (Schiffman and Kanuk 2003). We looked at buyer decision process from needing recognition to post purchase behaviour. We also looked at factors influencing the customers behaviour like cultural, social, personal and psychological to the buyer. Perception can be a way of belief or sight. A belief or opinion are often held by many people and are based on appearances. Sight is an awareness of things through the physical senses, especially sight or someone’s ability to notice and understand things that are not obvious to other people.

We looked at what needs to be done for assignment one with the experiments to test the appropriateness of perception theories in today’s society. We looked at why the five senses is important to advertisers which are sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. We looked at some pictures relating to some ads relating to the five senses.

This lesson helped me understand that marketers have to look at the five senses of the customers in order to catch our attention, this way they can increase the number of tactics to gain our attention for example perfume testers. Looking at some ads on you tube shows us how some ads are making use of backing music.

An article on this topic can be found on warc.com. Gestalt psychology is where an element captures our attention but the background is not very different even though it still does not catch our attention. We tend to see a incomplete picture as a complete one. This is done using contrast which is used a lot in the advertising industry. We need to try and fill in the gaps to see a picture completely, For example when we hear a couple of notes we then tend to remember the whole thing. A useful site for this form of advertising is http://www.scientificpsychic.com/graphics/.

WEEK 1 3rd October, 2008

This was my first lesson for the module understanding the customer.
We went through a presentation on fun and games with consumer psychology. We looked at who we think we are and we are what we have. We did an activity where we completed a form on what i think i am like, what others think i am like, what do i have that i like and what are these things and how do others interpret my possessions. We were told about the three courseworks we will be covering this year and what we have to be doing for each one. We had a look at the following website http://www.ruthseljournal.blogspot.com/ which gave us an insight and some help on how to set up the blogs for one of the assignments. The aim of the blogger is to demonstrate our understanding of the subject we are covering. The last hour of this lecture was used to log in to the computers and setting up our bloggers on blogger.com. We were told to do some reading on Solomon et at chapter 1 and 2.

This lesson showed us alot about how our lecturer uses the learning styles to get the work through to us. It also gave me an insight about the psychology behind different customer behaviours. I think it really does help to know what we think of ourselves and what others think of us. Being asked to carry out a blog that i have never done before, seems to be very handy and informative as this way we can look at what we do each week, which helps us to get up to date if we have missed out on any information given out. This can be done by looking at the other blogs created by other students and it also helps us to see how we learn and what we learn every week.