(BQ) Part 2 book “Consumer behavior” has contents: Consumer perception, consumer learning, consumer attitude formation and change, persuading consumers, the family and its social standing, subcultures and consumer behavior, consumer decision-making and diffusion of innovations, and other contents. | 4 Consumer Perception Learning Objectives 1 To understand the elements of perception and their role in consumer behavior. 2 To understand why consumers process only a small amount of the information they receive. 3 To understand how consumers organize consumption-related information. 4 To understand why and how consumers “add” biases to stimuli and the implications of this tendency for marketing. 5 To understand the elements of consumers’ imagery. 6 To understand how consumers determine the quality of products and services. 7 To understand consumers’ perceived risks and how they handle and reduce those risks. P erception is the process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret stimuli into a meaningful and coherent picture of the world. It can be described as “how we see the world around us.” Two individuals may be exposed to the same stimuli, but how each person recognizes, selects, organizes, and interprets these stimuli is a highly individual process based on each person’s own needs, values, and expectations. Consumers act and react on the basis of their perceptions, not on the basis of objective reality. For each individual, “reality” is a totally personal phenomenon, based on that person’s needs, wants, values, and personal experiences. Thus, to the marketer, consumers’ perceptions are much more important than their knowledge of objective reality. For if one thinks about it, it’s not what actually is so, but what consumers think is so, that affects their actions and their buying habits. And, because individuals make decisions and take actions based on what they perceive to be reality, it is important that marketers understand the notion of perception and its related concepts to determine more readily what factors influence consumers to buy. Since the 1970s, the identity of McCain, the UK’s largest seller of frozen chips was a signature in a rectangular black box, which conveyed the brand’s expertise in .
