[MUSIC] So today, we're going to talk about brand messaging and communications. We're not going to start at the strategic level, but we're going to go a little bit further down into the implementation and tactical level. And talk again about the way the consumers perceive your brand messaging and marketing. So, let's first start out with, what are perceptions? Perceptions is probably one of the most important aspects in consumer behavior, and in understanding consumer behavior. What is a perception? The perception is the process of developing an interpretation of a stimulus. Or in other words, deciding exactly what the stimulus means. This is really, really an important, crucial area in consumer behavior for two reasons. First, whatever cons, customers perceive, is what affects their subsequent actions and behavior. And second, and this is what's interesting, what they perceive is not necessarily what's true. Why is that? Well, the process of perception is constructive. People construct their interpretations on the fly. And this process is inherently biased. It contain, it, the process of perception comes in several different stages. The first two stages are, the stages of attention and exposure. Before you can form any kind of perception, you need to be exposed to the stimuli. And you need to pay attention to that stimuli. Pay attention to what's salient to you. And we know that that process is very biased. You only expose yourself to things. But there's, sometimes there's accidental exposure. But when you're consciously exposing yourself to things, many times it's a function of what you believe, what you're prior beliefs are. Let me give you an example. Say you think that a part of town is not safe. Well, you won't go to that part of town. You'll stay away from that part of town. So you won't expose yourself to something you don't think is safe. As a result, you never have, ability to change your perception, of that area of town because you don't collect new data. So we know that exposure can be selective. Similarly, even if you are exposed to something, if you don't pay attention to it, again it can affect your, your perceptions. And we know that there's 2 kinds of attention, there's voluntary attention, and involuntary attention. So involuntary attention is something like big bang, and you pay attention to it regardless of whether you would had intended to. But for voluntary attention, that again is selective. So we have the possibility of selective exposure, and selective attention. That means you're not collecting data on things that might be, might be able to change your perception. So that's first stage of bias. The second stage of bias is once you are exposed to something, and if you pay attention to it, then you have to interpret it. And we know that you interpret data subject to what you already believe. So for example, most people know if you watch a presidential debate, it's important to have representatives who in interpret what happened in the debate from both parties. Because we know a priori, the interpretations are going to vary based on their prior beliefs. And, that's the same thing for any kind of consumer behavior. You're exposed, pay attention to certain stimuli. But you interpret it subject to your prior expectations. As a result of this, perceptions are frequently biased, and they don't necessarily represent what's true. So what's the overview of the perceptual process? You're expo, there are sensory inputs that the marketer puts out. There's, we're going to talk about it, brand communication, there's advertising, there's packaging. All sorts of different, sensory inputs. And then you are exposed to them, or you're not. And sometimes the exposure, as I mentioned, is in a bias, bias way. And then, even if you are exposed to these inputs, you know, and you're exposed to thousands of marketing measures, marketing cues every single day. But how many of them do you pay attention to? So, first there's the issue of exposure. Then there's the issue of whether or not you pay attention to it. And finally, there's the issue of interpretation. Let me give you an example here. This is a psychological test. It's called a Stroop Test. And what I want to show you is that, your perceptions, and I just explained to you your perceptions could be biased, but your perceptions affect your subsequent behavior. Regardless, it's almost an automatic reaction. You have a certain perception, and then you automatically respond to that. And it's very had to control that, even if you think, well I understand that my perceptions might be biased, and therefore I'm going to try to do something to control that, so I don't react inappropriately. But these perceptions are automatic things, and it's very hard to block their effect. So let me just give you a little test here. I'm going to show you several words on the screen, and what I want you to do is tell me the color of the font. Okay, so let, there's going to be four words, and I'm going to just put them up on the screen, and to yourself tell me the color of the font. So, here are the words. Here's the second one. The third one. And, the fourth one. Now, by the fourth one, you probably got what was going on. I mean, the first one, maybe you were a little bit surprised. And you saw that the word was blue, but the color of the font was red, so the answer was red. By the fourth one, you understood the pattern, but it was still hard to break it. You couldn't stop yourself from reading the word, and reading the word affected your subsequent behavior, it slowed you down. That's actually the purpose of the Stroop test. It's a stress manipulation, it makes people feel a little bit uncomfortable because of that dissonance. If I put the words up where the words match the color of the font, the task is much simpler. So here's four words where the color matches and you can see, it's much easier, it's much faster to say the words. This is the same thing in the way marketing I'm going to show you that color has an effect, brand name has an effect. And you cannot block this effect. It affects your subsequent perceptions and subsequent behavior, and it's an automatic reaction that's difficult to stop. So let me just give you, here's an example. If I told you this is luscious chocolate, and I show you a picture of it if the shape of a cow pie, it's very hard to stop that first initial feeling of, ooh I don't want to eat this, that disgust feeling. And you know that it's good chocolate, but the shape has an involuntary effect on you. And that, that's a very important thing to understand. So marketers need to understand how these things affect your perceptions and your subsequent behaviors. Because as I say these are automatic reactions. There's some visual illusions you may have seen these before. I can show you these two lines on the screen. I will tell you you can measure them, they are exactly the same length. However one looks longer than the other, and you just can't stop that feeling. Even though I tell you they're exactly the same length and I can prove it to you, you still have the perception that the one on top is longer. Here's another example, here's an example of how your prior expectations influence your perception of the stimulus. So if I ask you, what is this that I've put on the screen. You'll answer differently if I show it to you this way versus when I showed it to you this way. And so that shows you what you perceive that stimulus is, is a function of your prior expectations. Here's another one that we know, and this one I'm going to take a little bit closer to marketing. There, there's a perception bias that's called the proximity bias. And what the proximity bias says, is if things are close to each other, you assume they're more similar. So if I asked you which lines are similar to each other, most people will say the two lines that are clustered together are similar. So that they'll cluster the two lines that are close to each other, rather than say the two bold lines or the two thin, thin lines. Because you make this inference of, things that are close to each other must belong together. And you can see this in the supermarket, in stores. It, if, say in the salad dressing, salad section, and where there's vegetables marketers may put, or grocers may put salad dressing near those salad. There's an implicit assumption that if the product is near another product, they belong together. So that's a perception. That physical distance affects whether things are similar or belong together. In the mall, stores that are close together or seem to be more similar. And there's a lot of there's a lot of use of this particular bias. Another one is the similarity bias. Things that look alike, people assume have the same quality. So this is the the, the underlying the, theory behind, say, store brands. If a store brand makes itself look very similar to the national brand, you assume the quality's the same, even though you haven't tested it, you don't know if that's the case. You're making an assumption of perceived quality, based on this process of similarity. And so these perceptual inferences are very, very strong at influencing your perception of quality, the way you consume the product, the way you experience the product, the price you're willing to pay, etc. And it's a very, very important consumer process for marketers to understand. It's particularly important in branding. So we know that if you take a glass of cola or a bottle of cola, and you slap on a brand, say the Coca Cola brand, people will have different perceptions about that product than if the brand wasn't there. With the Coca Cola brand on it, people will think it tastes better. They're willing to pay a higher price. They'll make all sorts of other inferences, even if the product's exactly the same. Once we put a brand on it, it changes the perceptions of the product. And people think, I'm not subject to that, I know. I can judge certain products by the quality. I'm not influenced by brand names. And, we know from experiment after experiment after experiment, that, that's just not true. People are very much influenced by the brand name that's put on the product, independently of the product quality. it's same way in the Stroop test. You just can't stop it. Once you see that brand name, you have certain perceptions. You make certain inferences about that brandname. And those perceptions are translated to the qual, to the product. We know that brand is such a powerful brand as we mentioned before. it has so much influence. The Coca Cola brand name has been estimated to be worth 70 billion dollars as an asset. Just putting that brand name on a product will change, as I said price premiums people are willing to pay, the quality, etc. When you know that that brand is worth so much, many times people look for ways to leverage the brand for growth. So ex, for example, you know Coca-Cola is associated with the cola soft drink. In 1982, Coca-Cola took that brand name and put it on a brand new product at the time, that no one had tasted before, a diet soft drink. They call it Diet Coke. And automatically, even though that product was not on the market before, people assume it has hot better taste, it's a higher quality product. And again they're willing to pay a higher premium price for that product. This is a brand new product, but the perceptions of it are so high because of the brand name that's stamped on the can. [MUSIC]
