Tab 1

Consumer Behaviour
MCS*2600
Week 1
Wednesday, January 8

Chapter 1 -
Topics
- Consumer – marketing interaction
- The definition of consumer behaviour
- Research Methodology

As consumers, how do we make decisions?

MOTIVATION INFORMATIO ATTENTION

N SEARCH TO MARKET
- Needs/wants
- Or marketers - Do we always - Or marketers
search rationally create artificial
needs
- Nice atmosphere
- Loyalty card
- Store layout

CONSUMER
EVALUATION
& LEARNING PRODUCT EVALUATION
CHOICE OF
- Do we give a fair
and true reflection - Did we make the - Is A really better
on product best choice? than B? Or we just
evaluation?

Are we in control of our decisions?

- Too depleted to resist
- Decreased pain of paying
- Careful decision for the fist item, shopping
-
 Week 2
Monday, January 13

Chapter 2 - Perception
Topics
1. Overview of the perceptual process
2. Five sensory systems
3. Exposure
4. Attention
5. Interpretation

How can we find out about what consumers think/feel/do/etc.?

- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Interviews
- Observations
- Dairy
- Experiments

Attitudes, opinions, behaviours, preferences

- Ask customers
- Self-report
- Surveys: quick, but not very in-depth info
- More in-depth
- Focus groups: but social influence
- Interviews: but time-consuming and limited in # of responses
- Storytelling, diary
- watch/observe consumers
- Avoid self-report biases
- Observers can immerse themselves in the consumer group
- But introduces observer biases: also time-consuming
- Another form: scanner data, clickstream data (e.g., Google
analytics)

Organization of the chapters

Sensation & Perception
- Sensation: immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose,
mouth, skin) to basic sensory stimuli (light, colour, sound, etc.)
- Perception: the process by which sensations are selected, organized, and
interpreted
- Add meanings to raw sensation
- Make sense of things

Hedonic consumption & design

- Sensory marketing
- Focus on perceptions to influence produce experience
- Deploy sensory cues to intensify perceptions of brands
- Hedonic vs. Utilitarian Consumption
- - hedonic: multisensory, fantasy, emotional
- Utilitarian: Functional

Sensory system
- Consumer reactions to colour
- Colour and emotion, attention, meaning
- Women are more sensitive than men
- Older people prefer white or other bright rones
- Colour in package and logo design
- Product association
- A segmentation tool
- Trade dress
- Sight
- The background colour of a webpage
- Package size & product volume
- What determines a product volume in a bottle?
- Which dimension is considered more?
- What if the packaging is irregular?
-
- Package size & consumption quantity
- Food container size
 - Glass shape
- Small package
- Food variety

-
- Styling
- Visual cues
- In 1982 Sun Light Dish Detergent came out in a
lemonade-shaped bottle with pictures of lemons and
“made with 10% real lemon juice” –visual cue:
lemonade– almost 80 people ingested it and had to be
treated
- Visual elements
- Advertising
- Store (online, physical building) design
- Packaging
- Product colour, size, style
- Colours have meaning and can evoke feelings (e.g.,
rev vs. blue, yellow vs. blue; black vs. white)
- Bright colours in a room attract attention, bring
people in, whereas calm colours in a room make
people stay longer
- Colour and demographics
- China: red = celebrations, japan and china:
white and black = mourning
- Colours become duller as age increases, older
people prefer white and brighter colours (Lexus
in white sells well)

Week 3
Mon. January, 20

Perceptual Process
Absolute threshold: the weakest amount of a stimulus you can detect
- “I can see a candle flame from 30 miles away! But not 31 miles away”
Difference threshold: The smallest amount of change in stimulus you can detect
- “I can see the difference between these two colours (blue and green), but
not between these two (blues that are too similar)

Exposure
- Marketing situations
- Want a difference to be detected
- Offer a discount, 20%?
- Want a difference to be unnoticed
- Increase the price; reduce the size/quantity
- Applications
- Ensure that negative product differences (e.g., smaller size) are not
noticed by the consumer
- Ensure that product improvements are noticeable
- Webster's Law: the amount of change that is necessary to be noticed is
systematically related to the original intensity of the stimulus. The
stronger the initial stimulus, the greater its change must be for it to be
noticed
- K = ΔI / I
 - K = the constant increase or decrease necessary for the stimulus to
be noticed (this varies across the senses)
- ΔI = the minimal change in intensity of the stimulus required to be
noticeable to the person (J.N.D.)
- I = the intensity of the stimulus before the change occurs

Attention
- The extent to which the processing activity is devoted to a particular
stimulus
- Attention is limited
- Attention is selective
- Attention affects consumption experience
- Limited attention influences sensation/perception (why?)
- Taste perception gets less intense when consumers are:
- Distracted by other task (Van der Wal & Van Dillen, 2013)
- Exposed to background noise (Woods et al., 2011)
- Consumers are selective about what they pay attention to (perceptual
selectivity)
- Why: information & sensory overload
- Personal selection factors
- Perceptual vigilance: more light to be aware of stimuli that relate
to current needs
- Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or Red Car Syndrome
(frequency illusion)
- Perceptual defense: see what they want to see and dont see what
they dont want to see
- McGinnies (1949): flashing card experiment
- Adaptation: get used to it because of familiarity
- Less intense, long duration, simple, frequent encountered,
irrelevant or unimponrtant
- Health Canada proposed new warning sign on cigarette
packages
- https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/health-canada-
unveils-graphic-new-tobacco-labels/
- How to attract consumers’ attention?
- Stimulus selection factors - increase “contrast”
- Size, colour, position, novelty
- Create contrast (e.g., intensity, movement, colour) by
using novel ideas
- Strategies to attract attention and maintain attention:
- Attract initial attention: new brands
- Innovative ways of presenting print and elements
- Maintain attention: familiar brands
- Elaborate on product information to build brand
relationships

Ad design that attracts attention

 - Complex ad design can attract more attention to the picture in the ad &
the ad as a whole, and elicit positive attitude toward the ad
- Pieters, Wedel & Batra (2010), Journal of Marketing
- Complex design means
- More objects
- Irregular objects
- Dissimilarity of objects
- More visual detail from color, edges, texture
- Asymmetry of object
- Irregularity of object arrangement
- Difficulty of identifying the brand can reduce attention to the brand in the
ad, attention to the ad as a whole, and ad comprehensibility
- Pieters, Wedel & Batra (2010), Journal of Marketing
- Difficulty means
- Low brand contrast
- Small relative brand size
- Brand is masked
- Heterogeneous brand background

Interpretation
- Assigning meanings to sensory stimuli (a top-down processing...)
- Same stimuli can be interpreted differently by consumers, because
individual expectations affects perception
- Assign meaning to stimuli based on the schema (a set of beliefs) to which
the stimulus is assigned
- Alpine class vs. regular down fill; silk as an ingredient in shampoo (Brown
& Carpenter, 2000)
- Stimulus Organization (Gestalt Psychology – meaning comes from the
totality of a set of stimuli, not just from any individual stimulus)
- Principle of closure (consumers tend to perceive an incomplete
picture as complete - they fill in the blank)
- Gestalt Psychology
- Principle of similarity (consumers tend to group similar things
together)

Week 3
Wed. January 22
Interpretation
- Assigning meaning to the stimulus
- Can be derived from past experiences with similar products or the
organization/context
- Stimulus organization (Gestalt Psychology - meaning comes from the
totality of set stimuli, not just from any individual stimulus)
- Principle of closure (consumers tend to perceive an incomplete
picture as complete - they fill in the blank)
- Gestalt Psychology
 - Principle of similarity (consumers tend to group similar things
together)
- Figure-ground principle: simplify a scene into the main object that
we are looking at (the figure) and everything else that forms the
background (or ground)
- Principle of proximity (elements closer are perceived to be more related)
- Semiotics
- The correspondence between signs and symbols and their role in
the assignment of meaning
- Message components
- Objective: product – Molson Canadian
- Sign or symbol: Joe, a typical Canadian male
- Interpretant: the meaning derived – true Canadian identity

Agenda
- Theories about learning
- Behavioural learning theories: classical and instrumental conditioning
- Cognitive learning theories
- Memory

Learning
- Relatively permanent changes in behaviour, feelings, and thoughts
caused by experience or information
- Ongoing process
- We can learn intentionally or incidentally
- We can learn from our own experience or from others (vicariously)

Theories about learning

1. Behavioural learning
a. Learning takes place as the result of responses to external events
b. Do NOT focus on internal thought processes. Emphasize the
observable aspects of behaviour. The observers can only see the
input and output
c. Classical conditioning and instrumental conditioning
2. Cognitive learning
a. Focus on internal mental pricesses
b. Stress memory as the center of learning
c. A result of conscious information processing

Classical conditioning
Evaluative conditioning
- Positive attitude from a positive stimulus is transferred to neutral
stimulus
- Why?
- Misattribution
- Build a connection in memory: strong link build between
brand/product and the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) - Note!! If
attitude towards UCS changes, so does attitude towards the brand
- Works best with unfamiliar brands, or brands you do not already
hold a strong attitude towards

Associative learning
- Form simple associations between stimuli without involving memory or
cognition
- E.g., classical conditioning
- Form associations between more complex reactions
- E.g., credit card = able to make larger purchases–people tend to
tip more when using credit cards
- Repetition
- The more a stimulus and response are linked together, the more
likely learning occurs
- Too much repetition leads to advertising wear out
- Remedies
- Repetition better to spread out through different channels (TV &
print)
- Repeat theme instead of exact content

Instrumental/Operant conditioning
- Learning behaviour with reward and punishment
- Light: neutral
- Food: reward
- Desired behaviour: pull lever
- Instrumental vs. classical
- Both are behavioural learning; BUT
- Classical: involuntary, automatic
- Instrumental: learn behaviours (simple and complex) based on
positive/negative outcomes
- Associate behaviour with reward or punishment
- Behaviour is instrumental in getting the reward or avoiding
a punishment
- Instrumental conditioning is the principle behind training pets to do
tricks, teaching babies their first words, etc.
 Week 4
Jan 27, 2025

Ch. 3: Behavioural learning

- doesn’t matter whats happening in the brain, whats important is what
comes before and after these behaviours
- theory-heavy, application later

5 things
- Unconditional stimulus
- Unconditional Response
- Conditional stimulus
- Conditional Response
- Neutral stimulus

Have examples by which you see the

What does instrumental mean?

- You are working on certain behaviours to accomplish certain outcomes

Negative reinforcement: removing negative things

- Healing an illness or
- Lose fat! Be gone with it!
- Removing bad things

Positive reinforcement: achieve/receive a positive outcome

- Eat vegetables = get lean
- Gain muscle! Fell good!
- Gaining positive things
- Positive outcome!
- Encouraging behaviour!

Punishment: don’t do this or you will be punished

- Shock collar to train dog to stay in the yard

Extinction: discourage you from doing something by removing the positive

outcome
- If you remove the food, the rat won't pull the lever anymore
- Positive outcome!
- Discouraging behaviour!

For example
Desired behaviour: Participate in the HEAT program
Positive reinforcement: a better figure
- Increases/keeps gym visit
Negative reinforcement: losing weight
- Increases/keeps gym visit
Extinction: “I don’t see your figure getting any better”
- Discourage by removing the motive”
Punishment: “You seem to be very exhausted lately”
- Discouraging through telling something negative

Desired behaviour: Discourage people from eating burgers

Punishment: stop eating burgers or you won’t get to watch your TV show at
night
- Punishment does not need to relate to eating

How to be tested:
1. Definitive all four terms
a. Include encouraging/discouraging behaviour
b. Include positive/negative outcomes

Classic and instrumental conditioning

Classic: showing you the stimulus and you’re developing your habits
- Stimulus before behaviour
Instrumental: reward at the end
- Reward = stimuli
- go to the gym and here are the benefits you will see later
- Stimulus after behaviour
[comparison if learning theories chart]

Be ready to define these terms and give examples

End of behavioural learning^

cognitive/observational learning
Memory
- Internal process includes information processing
- Retain info to retrieve it later
- External inputs > encoding > storage > retrieval
- Stronger memory of the show Gilmore Girls, therefore you relate/more
relevant ad for kureg when they use a reference to Lukes coffee
Encoding
- Information that is linked to existing knowledge is better retained
 Week 5
February 3, 2025

Chapter 4 continued
Motivational direction

Utilitarian vs. hedonic motives

- Product design
- Products that meet or exceed customers’ utilitarian needs enhance
satisfaction (e.g., a car with antilock brakes and vehicle stability
audio system)
- Products that meet or exceed customers’ hedonic wants enhance
customer delight (e.g., a car with panoramic sunroof and six-
speaker audio system)

Retail store design

- Shopping motives
- Utilitarian motive: tast oriented, buying
- Arousing, exciting store environment – less pleasant
- Hedonic motive: recreation-oriented, browsing
- Arousing, exciting store environment – more pleasant – more
visit, purchase

Motivational conflicts
- Goal valence: positive or negative
- Positively valued goal: approach
- Negatively valued goal: avoid
- Approach-approach conflict
- Choosing between desirable alternatives
- Choosing A means you can’t have B
- Buying an iphone or a samsung
- Consumers: after choosing one alternative, they need to reduce
theu cognitive dissonance
- Marketers: make their alternatives more attractive by bundling
several benefits (different from/more than their competitors)

Approach–Avoidance conflict
- A desired product has both positive and negative aspects
- Focus on positive, minimize negative
- Guilt reduction
- Diet coke, a low-fat dessert
- L’Oreal: “because I'm worth it!”
- Pay by installmrnt: only $149/month
- Warning: focus on the negative
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ONk5yOpIJ4
-
Involvement
Affect