It's all about perception...

Hello and welcome back!

Another week is gone and we learned more about the big mystery named buyer. The last lesson was about perception. We defined perception as a "sort of assumption" and "something you believe to be true". In an on-line dictionary I found following definition: Psychology. a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present. To put it in other words: Perception is our personal impression and interpretation of the world that surrounds us. But it is not only how we see things, but also how we react to these. The perception process is divided into three steps: Sensation, Attention & Interpretation.

But why are we talking about perception? Perception is one of the psychological characteristics that are influencing the buyer and his/her behavior. We compared the buyer with a black box, because it is complicated and difficult to understand. This black box is influenced by different stimuli (or inputs), like price, product, perception, culture, age, lifestyle and many more. The buyer/black box is transferring these into an output, e.g. he buys a product or not, or he decides to buy it maybe later.

A second model is the buyer-behaviour model by Howard Sheth. It looks very confusing, but basically it is just an extension of the black-box-model and it includes more details.

We experience our world through our various senses, e.g. seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting. But how we experience and react to things is very different. Let's try an example; what do you see on the following picture? 

At the first glance some see a young girl, others see an old woman. And there are lots of others examples. Here can you try other examples.

So, one thing is that perception is unique to every person. Another aspect is that we never receive all the information we get. There are sounds, which the human ear simply cannot hear. But there are also so many different things in our environment and we cannot pay attention to everything. As an example, try this one;-) 

Perception is a very important factor for the design of advertisements, products or packages. It is vital to get the attention of the customer, for example with bright colors or simple black/white commercials. But also the name or the music (for example in a TV commercial) is important. In the lesson we had the task to sell colors. We got a sheet with different colors and a mash up, which represented our target group (In our group we had the "middle-class families, with teenagers). The task now was to think of attractive names for the colors and a special brandname. Our group had a color called "provence" (lilac). It was referring to the French countryside, because there grows a lot of lavender, which has the same color. We had to imagine, what our customers might like, and what kind of colours they want. So, now we know that there is a difference between "yellow" and "Egyptian sun", but also that names or colors have a different impact on different people. 

Anyway, that's it about perception for today. If you want to get more information about perception, try this page. 

I hope you found it interesting and enjoyed reading this. Your feedback is always welcome! 

Best Wishes from Bucks,

Rebecca