Download Information Processing

Information Processing
Week 2
C273 Consumer Behaviour
Read Chapters 3 & 4
Information processing concept
Model of information processing
Perception
Involvement concept
Relationship between involvement and
perception
Information . . .
. . .is the content of
what is exchanged with
the outer world as we
adjust to it and make
our adjustment felt
upon it.
. . . allows us to adapt
to and even influence
the world around us.
Information Processing . . .
. . . is the process through which consumers
are exposed to information, attend to it,
comprehend it, place it in memory, and
retrieve it for later use.
Three Important Factors
Influence Information
Processing:
Perception
Involvement
Memory (Chapter 4)
Perception . . .
. . . is the process through which individuals
are exposed to information, attend to the
information, and comprehend the
information.
Three Stages of Perception
Exposure stage - consumers receive
information through their senses.
Attention stage - consumers allocate
processing capacity to a stimulus.
Comprehension stage - consumers
organize and interpret the information to
obtain meaning from it.
Information processing
model
Involvement -> Memory
Exposure
Attention
Comprehension
Stages of information
processing
Exposure
receiving information through senses
Attention
allocating processing capacity to the stimulus
Comprehension
obtaining meaning from the information
received.
Effects on perception
Personal involvement
Memory
Involvement
The level of perceived personal
importance and/or interest in the stimulus
As involvement increases a person has
greater motivation to comprehend and to
elaborate on information
Influences whether a person moves from
exposure to attention to comprehension.
Consumer Involvement . . .
. . . is the perceived personal importance
and/or interest attached to the acquistion,
consumption, and disposition of a good,
service, or idea.
As involvement increases, the consumer has
greater motivation to comprehend and
elaborate on information.
What makes an issue
personally important to
you?
Risk?
financial
personal
social
Enjoyment?
message
product/ experience
Factors affecting purchase
involvement
Types of involvement
Situational
short term
precipitated by specific situation such as the
purchase.
Enduring
long term
a commitment and concern for the product
class, not dependent on situation.
As Involvement Levels
Increase:
Consumers tend to process more in-depth
information
General increase in arousal levels
Consumers are likely to give more diligent
consideration to information relevant to the
particular decision
More likely to be an extended decisionmaking process
Dimensions of involvement
Self-expressive importance
expressing self-concept to others
Hedonic
pleasurable of fascinating aspect of
product
Practical relevance
needed, essential, beneficial product
Purchase risk
risk of making a poor decision.
Table 3.1: Measuring enduring
involvement in automobiles:
 Worth the extra cost for attractive car
 prefer car with strong personality
 car offers relaxation and fun to relieve pressure
 I get wrapped up in my car
 driving relieves daily pressures
 interest in car racing
 driving along a stretch recharges me
 my car isn’t ordinary
 driving my car is one of the most satisfying and
enjoyable things I do.
Involvement and
information processing
Consumers tend to process more in-depth
information with increased levels of
involvement.
Marketeers can provide more complex
messages for highly involved consumers.
Memory helps guide the exposure and
attention process and assists the
comprehension process.
Exposure
The Exposure Stage
Exposure to a stimulus is the first step in
the processing of information.
The sensory organs are activated and the
entire mechanism of information
processing can begin.
Influencing a consumer is done by
exposing consumers to information
through marketing communications.
Exposure stage in
information processing
Selective exposure
Sensation
Selective exposure
A person decides whether or not to be
exposed to information.
Zipping video, and Zapping stations
important points first and loud!
Zapping, or
channel
surfing, with
the television
remote
control is a
problem for
advertisers
Sensation
Prior to comprehension
Absolute threshold:
lowest level that can be detected (50% of
the time)
The Study of Sensation . . .
. . . investigates the
way people react to
raw sensory
information received
through their sense
organs.
Just noticeable difference
The minimal difference in intensity of a
stimulus that can be detected (50% of the
time)
How much change in a product feature
must be made for people to notice?
Weber’s Law and the JND
Weber's Law states that as the intensity
of the stimulus increases, the ability to
detect a difference between the two levels
of the stimulus decreases.
JND--Just Noticeable Difference
JND = Intensity X Constant (.20 rule of
thumb)
How much to lower price of $20,000 car?
Weber’s Law
I

I
The ratio of noticeable change in intensity
to original intensity remains constant.
Weber’s Law
JND  I  
Where:
I = intensity level
K = constant
Subliminal Perception . . .
. . . refers to
presenting a stimulus
below the level of
conscious awareness
in an attempt to
influence behaviour
and feelings.
Subliminal perception
Below the limen.
Below the level of conscious awareness
accelerated or reversed speech
embedded visual stimuli
Generally subliminal stimuli don’t work.
Some more on subliminal
perception
(Mainly because it’s such
popular nonsense)
 James Vicary introduced
subliminal advertising in
the 1950’s.
 He claimed to have
increased sales of Coke
and popcorn by flashing
the words “Eat popcorn”
and “Drink Coke” every
five seconds in a
cinema.
 No one has ever been
able to repeat
Vicary’s results.
 Wilson Bryan Key's popular book Subliminal Seduction
(1973) resurrected subliminal hysteria.
 Subtitled Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent
America, the book charged that the use of hidden
messages and images in print ads is widespread and
causes millions of consumers to buy more, more, more.
 The subliminal mechanism that concerned Key most was
the "embed" -- a word, slogan, or symbol inserted
faintly -- so faintly it is not perceived -- into
advertisements.
 "You cannot pick up a newspaper, magazine, or
pamphlet, hear radio, or view television without being
assaulted subliminally by embeds," Key claimed.
 This is in an industry that can be nearly as silly as
Melrose Place. How come no-one has ever
revealed his/her involvement in creating
subliminal messages?
Wilson Bryan Key
saw S-E-X
embedded
everywhere,
even in Ritz
crackers.
Is this a PENIS?
Castle spire on the
video slip cover of
Disney's Little Mermaid
How subliminal embeds are supposed
to work
The embed is so small or feint or hidden that you can’t
actually see it.
But you do see the embed without actually being aware
that you’ve seen it.
Your subconscious mind activates other deeply held
subconscious, primitive urges - typically associated
with death or sex.
Those primitive urges are associated with specific
brands of product - and somehow this makes those
products more attractive.
You respond to those urges almost instantly, without
being aware of it, by buying a specific branded
product.
Concluding subliminal
“seduction”
If you’re sufficiently paranoid, and
if you look hard enough and long enough
then
you can find evidence for whatever you
want.
Be careful of pseudoscientists,
fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists.
They’re trying to sell you something.
Attention
Attention
Allocating cognitive capacity to a stimulus
Involuntary
voluntary
The Attention Stage
Before consumers can comprehend and
remember information, they must first
attend to it.
Attention involves the allocation of cognitive
capacity to an object or task so that
information is consciously processed.
The more demanding the task, the greater
amount of attention will be focused on it.
Selective attention
Voluntary attention
deliberately paying attention or seeking
out information
Capturing Consumers’
Attention
Goal is to activate the
orientation reflex by
creating stimuli that
surprise, threaten, or
violate the
expectation of
consumers.
Orientation reflex
Involuntary attention.
Surprising or novel stimulus.
If a message is not interesting then the
marketeer must try to cpatur the
consumers’ attention.
Perception
The Comprehension Stage
...
. . . is the process in which individuals
organize and interpret information
Perceptual organization is the way people
perceive the shapes, forms, figures, and lines in
their visual world.
Interpretation process is how people draw upon
their experience, memory, and expectations to
attach meaning to a stimulus.
Perceptual Organization
Gestalt psychologists
attempted to identify
the rules that govern
how people take
disjointed stimuli and
make sense out of
them.
Perceptual constancy
 We have the
unconscious
understanding that
objects around us are
not changing in their
size, shape or
and the door opened,
the image being
castthough
on the retina
brightness.
Even
diagram. The image may become more of a trapezoid,
the
imageit has
that
objects
of the door has
not changed;
remained
constant. This
shape constancy.
are casting on our
retinas are in a constant
state of change.
 Size brightness
 Brightness constancy
Gestalt principles of
perception
Figure & Ground
Closure
Similarity
Proximity
Figure and ground
 When presented with a
stimulus we naturally
tend to divide the
information into what is
the most prominent or
most important (the
figure) and what is
forming the
background.
 Example: The white
object would be
considered the figure
and the grey forms the
ground.
Ambiguou
s figure &
ground
 A stimulus can be perceived in different ways,
depending which aspect of the stimulus we concentrate
on as the figure and which aspect we see as the ground.
 Example: first drawn by Rubin around 1920.
Figure &
ground:
Impossible
figures.
M.C. Escher
“Waterfall”
Figure &
ground:
Impossible
figures.
M.C. Escher
“Climbing and
Descending”
Closure
 Our visual perception processes are pretty clever at
sorting out a complete message from incomplete
information; we can get a whole message from a small
amount of often sketchy information.
 We tend to perceive this figure as a triangle with two
parts blocked out instead of seeing it as a random series
of unjoined lines. Our natural tendency to form
complete figures through closure causes this.
Closure
Sunday afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte Georges Seurat (1884-1886)
Similarity
 When you watch a football match, how do you group
the players on the field?
 Usually by the teams they represent. Eagles Vs Dockers
 You use what the Gestalt psychologists call the principle
of similarity. When we are presented with a stimulus we
naturally tend to group together things which are similar
in their size, shape, colour or brightness.
Proximity
(Nearness)
 We also tend to decide which
parts of a stimulus belong
together according to their
physical closeness to each other.
 Example: if we see ten people
standing near each other and
three people standing nearby we
tend to perceive them as
separate groups rather than as a
single group of thirteen.
Depth cues
Primary
Muscular
Secondary
Pictorial
Pictorial cue: Interposition (Overlap)
 When our view of an
object is partly
obscured by another
object we realise that
that the object which
is obscured is further
away.
Texture gradient
 When we are closer to an
object we are able to
perceive more detail in an
object.
 We might see three
different shades of beige
in a carpet when we are
close to it, but at a
distance it blends into one
colour.
Linear perspective
 Lines that we know are
parallel appear to converge
or grow closer together as
the distance increases.
Links to other optical
effects
Check the Visual Illusions Gallery at:
http://valley.uml.edu/landrigan/illusion.html
and The Joy of Visual Perception: A Web
Book by Peter K.Kaiser at:
http://www.yorku.ca/eye/
Muscular (Primary) depth
cues
The fact that these cues are referred to as
muscular cues tells us that they come from
within the body, especially the muscles
controlling our eyes.
1. Accommodation
2. Retinal disparity
3. Convergence
Accommodation
As we try to focus on objects which are closer
or further away, the muscles controlling the
shape of the lens actually alter the shape of it to
make the focussing possible.
Retinal disparity
Because of the fact that our eyes are 6-7
centimetres apart each receives a slightly
different view of the world. Our brain takes
these two images and fuses them into one
stereoscopic image that lets us perceive the
world in three dimensions.
Convergence
As we look at objects which are within about 7
metres of us our eyes must turn inwards. The
muscles which control the eyes send information
to the brain about how far the eyes have
turned. This tells us how far the object we are
looking at is from us.
Interpretation . . .
. . .is trying to gain an
understanding of
something garnering
our attention
Semiotics . . .
. . . is the analysis of
how people obtain
meaning from signs
Signs are the words,
gestures, pictures,
products, and logos
used to communicate
information from one
person to another.