Internal Influences - Emotion and Perception

A. Emotion

Emotion is difficult to define, and even more difficult to predict. However, they are important to marketers because consumers tend to react to marketing messages and make purchases based on feelings and emotions. Emotion can be used to create product benefits. Such as with Tide detergent and Cheerios cereal; their commercials feature families having wonderful moments together, that couldn't have happened without those products.

Emotion in advertising enhances attention, attraction, and is processed more thoroughly by the consumer and may be remembered better.

These are the elements of the relationship between emotion and understanding:

• Self control-the ability to control your emotions
• Emotional empathy-the ability to understand other people's emotions
• Positive/negative outlook-a person's outlook on life can be upbeat and optimistic or depressed and negative; most people fall somewhere in between
• Productivity-ability to use emotions to solve problems

B. Perception

Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information Perception has four major steps:

1. Exposure - When a stimulus (like a billboard) comes within range of your senses (vision)

2. Attention - Determined by the individual and the situation; Nerves pass the information onto the brain for processing

3. Interpretation - when marketing messages are assigned meaning

4. Memory

• a. Short-term—for immediate decision making
• b. Long-term—for retention

For an ad to be successful it must have the following four elements:

1. Exposure

Must physically reach the consumer

2. Attention

The consumer must attend to it

3. Interpretation

It must be properly interpreted

4. Memory

Must be stored in memory that will allow retrieval

Internal Influences - Memory

Marketing messages can be effective only if the consumer correctly understands the messages, and remembers them when needed. Memory refers to a consumer's ability to understand the marketing messages and assign them value and meaning. Value and meaning always together.

The value and meaning assigned is largely determined by internal factors, (thoughts, feelings, emotion, attitude, perception, motivation, personality, lifestyle) which are different for each consumer.

For example, a consumer who drinks lots of milk, sees an advertisement that says "Got Milk?" and since they already have positive feelings for the product they will purchase more milk, whereas a consumer who does not enjoy drinking milk and sees the same ad, may dismiss the ad or may try drinking more milk for a short period of time and then decrease consumption again.

Three things influence consumer's ability to understand messages:

Physical Characteristics of message

• Imagery: When the brand name, words, and slogan work together to create an image in the mind of the consumer, it will invoke ideas, feelings and objects, and a direct recovery of past experiences. Disney is big on evoking nostalgia and past experiences, they want adult customers to remember being taken to the Disney parks as a child and then repeat the experiences with their own children. Much of their advertisement depicts families having wonderful experiences together, while the adults are remembering being there as children.
• Color: Colors have an enormous impact on marketing messages, and color affects consumers in a subjective manner, so that most of the time consumers don’t even know they are being affected! For example, in the US, the color red makes people eat 25% more, therefore most restaurants use red as their main color. The meaning and value assigned to colors changes with the culture, so marketers need to be fully aware of how color is interpreted by different groups of people. For example, the Starbucks Coffee Company logo is green, but when they opened shops in Malaysia, they had to change the logo to brown because in that culture green is associated with sickness.
• Font: The presentation of words and how they are shaped will also enhance the marketing message and contribute to the value and meaning. For example, these two different fonts for a cigarette company will convey entirely different meanings, and may attract two different customers.
• by Mkt Teachers