Perception

Perception. Wilkie (1994) suggests "perception is the process of sensing selecting and interpreting consumer stimuli in the external world". Shifmann & Kanuck suggest perception is simply how we see the world around us. I prefer to think of it as, what we see and what we think of it. In other words if I see a green apple with a dew drop on it, I may perceive that as a nice, tasty snack. However I may not like apples, in which case I may see it as a horrible, sour, unwanted piece of food. If two people see a chocolate bar, one may perceive it as a lovely treat while the other may see it as fattening and unhealthy. Therefore perception is not just what wee see, hear, taste, smell and touch but how we interpret and analyse this information.



The Howard-Sheth theory of buyer behavior highlights the importance of perceptual reaction in the buying process.



Here is a link to Howard J,Sheth J. A Theory of Buyer Behaviour

http://www.jagsheth.net/docs/A%20Theory%20of%20Buyer%20Behavior2.pdf

Here is a page taken from the above website that contains a quick summary of buyer behaviour by Howard J, Sheth J.



How Much Can We Really Perceive?

Bander R, and Grinder J (1980) created the Neuoro Linguistic Programming model as seen below.



It suggests that we take in 2,000,000 bits of sensory information and we then reduce that to 134 bits in our internal re-presentation, in other words humans can sense a great deal of information but can process only a fraction of this information into a thought or an idea.

Here is a perceptual awareness test that should help understand this theory.




Paint Excercise


We were asked to create a brand and product names for a range of 9 paints. The idea was to try and make these paints as appealing as possible to a particular target group, for example young urban professionals or well off retired people. This task demonstrates perception rather well as it became obvious that well off retired people would perceive a light blue colour very differently to young urban professionals. Therefore the marketing strategy for these two groups needs to be very different and take into account how the specific target groups will perceive the colours.

Our group was given the unenviable task of marketing our paints to well off retired people, the results are below.



We decided that a nature theme would appeal to the well off retired people as we felt that people of retirement age appreciate the beauty of nature and want to live in a calming, relaxing environment.