Today we're going to see how the perceptions and attitudes of consumers
impact their decision-making when making a particular purchase.
So the first concept is perceptions.
Now let's look at an example of how perceptions affect your decision-making
process.
Think about a test where you are drinking two glasses of a soft drink,
where the brands of the soft drink are not mentioned on the glasses.
In this scenario, you are probably going to perceive those two brands of
soft drinks pretty much equally, because you have no idea what brand they are.
However, the moment you see the brand of the product mentioned on the glasses.
Let's say you have two brands, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, you might slowly start building
up some kind of a preference structure, so your perceptions might change.
Maybe initially you perceived both the brands equally.
But now that you see the name of the brands on the glasses,
you might prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola, or vice versa.
At the same time, given that those two brands are already visible to you,
if you look at the bottles of these two soft drink brands,
maybe even the packaging will impact your perceptions of the product.
So as we just saw, just by putting a brand name to a particular product,
or maybe even the packaging of that particular product,
can change your preference structure for that particular brand.
And this is all about the perceptions of the consumers.
The next idea which impacts the preference-building
process of a consumer is called attitudes.
Now, what are attitudes?
Attitudes are, basically, lasting overall evaluations of people,
of brands, of objects, of advertisements, and so on.
As a consumer, there's always a tendency to maintain your attitudes.
This kind of ties back to the status quo bias we
talked about under prospect theory of bounded rationality.
However, consumers at this one one hand try to maintain their attitudes.
But the marketers themselves also try to influence the consumers
to maintain a consistent attitude.
Why do they do that?
Basically, to make sure that the consumers they have already obtained,
or acquired, are there with them for the long run.
As well as making sure they have some idea of these consumers' needs over time.
How do marketers maintain consumers' attitudes?
There are two main ways to do this.
First one is called foot-in-the-door technique.
That is, if a marketer has been able to acquire a particular consumer,
they have gained some entry in the consumer's mind.
What they do is, once they have this entry into the consumer's mind, they want to
emphasis this entrance by putting in messages which are very consistent.
And making sure the consumer slowly develops into a loyal consumer.
The second technique which a marketer can do in order to retain their consumers,
or avoid consumers defection, is dissonance reduction.
What is dissonance reduction?
Here, as a marketer you try to avoid inconsistency in messages.
That is, you do not provide them
different messages which might lead consumer confusion.
However, there's always an incentive for a marketer to influence consumers in
order to modify their attitudes, because a consumer might still not be acquired.
In order to acquire new consumers, marketers use different techniques.
So that they can change the attitude of the consumers.
The most important technique which marketers can use is called
elaboration likelihood model.
Here, let's say the marketer is selling a high-involvement product.
Think about a category like electronics.
Here the message which a marketer can send to the consumers
can be something which focuses on the arguments.
That is, a message which explains the features of the product,
what are the benefits of the product,
how this product is superior to a competing product, and so on.
So this is how a marketer can probably acquire new consumers.
The second type of product category might be a low-involvement product category.
In this case, of course, there's not much information which
can be provided to the consumer to make them purchase a product.
So probably you are in the market selling milk, and then in this case
the important factor is not what are the characteristics of the milk,
or what are the price of the milk.
But rather, your emphasis as a marketer is to focus on peripheral cues.
So something really catchy which can get the consumer's attention.
And by that attention-grabbing a consumer will be interested in
buying that particular brand of milk.
So these are the most important things, that is, perceptions and attitudes,
which influences a consumer's decision-making process.
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
Shameek SinhaProfessor
