Thrown in at the deep end! (Fun and games with consumer psychocogy)

So, today was my first lesson… It was extremely different from what I anticipated as the class was surprisingly small, although, I guess that’s a good aspect. Straight away I felt at ease and found myself chatting away to others around me, although, I probably shouldn’t have been! I found the warm and friendly atmosphere very welcoming considering most people have already bonded and made their friends. First impressions were great!

Our lesson began with ‘Buyer Decision Process’ which, believe it or not, each of us go through each time we make a purchase. Yes girls, every time we buy a pair of gorgeous shoes that we really ‘need’, we go through a complicated decision making process, even though you may not consciously realise it. The buyer decision process is made up of 5 aspects beginning with problem recognition which is when we realise were fed up of wearing the same old black pumps to college every day! During stage two we go on an ‘information search’ where we ask friends/boyfriend etc what they think (although, if we really want those shoes, do we care what our boyfriend thinks?!). Stage three is called ‘Evaluation of alternatives’ and it is only now that we look around ‘Office’ or ‘SCHU’ and compare design, style and price before arriving at stage five and making our product choice. The final stage is the outcome, i.e. do we take the shoes home and enjoy showing them off to our friends or do we return them to the store? Chances are, those pretty pumps are never being returned!
When the buyer decision process is put into context it’s relevant to everyone, and for this reason, I found it extremely interesting.

We went on to discuss perception which Wilkie, 1994 defines as “…the process of sensing and interpreting consumer stimuli in the external world”, however, perception can also be described as “… how we see the world around us” (Schiffman and Kanuk 2003). The perceptual process begins with sensory receptors, for example, our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and fingers; however, actual perception is the process by which these stimuli are selected, organised and interpreted. I have included a diagram or the perceptual process below.

Based on this theory, we had a bit of fun in class with perception. We split into four groups with two groups made up of females only, one group made up of males only and one group with both males and females. We were given a sheet with an age group on it along with a few pictures related to this group and also an a3 sized sheet of paper with colours from a paint chart on it. Each group got a different age group however all the colours were the same, luckily we got the under eight group! The aim of the task was to come up with names for the individual colours to make them attractive to the designated age group. Being in the all female group we found it quite easy, coming up with creative names such as ‘racing car red’ and ‘candyfloss cream’. We then swapped with the all male group who were given middle aged, working class adults with teenagers. We found a vast difference in their names compared to ours, as they were boring and it seemed to us as though no thought or creativity had gone into it what so ever!! Apparently this isn’t the case, and men are just less worried about little details like the names of the colour their going to paint their kitchen (or, get their other halves to paint the kitchen!!). What a disappointment, we thought they were just trying to get away with doing as little work as possible!

This task relates back to buyer decisions and advertising, in that, the detail included in an advertisement aimed at the male population is a lot simpler, basic and probably won’t include as much colour and detail as an advertisement aimed at the female population. Our experiment backs this theory up as it was clear to us that the guys weren’t worried about little details like names of colours and were a lot more ‘to the point’ than us ladies!

I learned a lot from this lesson;

No.1; Boys WILL be boys;
No.2; Being thrown in at the deep end isn’t so bad after all!!