Perception...

The lesson today revolved around the idea of perception. Perception is an undeniably essential element in the world of Marketing, Communications and Public Relations. Perception depends on a variety of factors such as nationality, religion, age, life experience and family values, to name but a few. It is vital for us to understand how to target all people’s commonplace perceptions and effectively make ourselves understood. In order to have hands-on, primary research, groups led experiments regarding different people/types of people and how they perceive routine objects when reliant on one sense. For example, a group allowed us to smell a variety of shampoos and asked us to deduct the brand from the smell alone. Possibly a superior experiment would have been to ask which smelt the most expensive, as the brands used were not universal. The experiment led by myself and Sallie was a taste test. Very simple, yet effective. We took a sample of people, half men, half women, one polish, one Portuguese, one Malawi and five British and produced 16 cups, 8 with diet coke samples and 8 with diet Pepsi samples and gave one of each to the contenders. the preconceived idea was that coke a highly favoured over Pepsi and 7 of the 8 were sure that Pepsi was coke and vice versa, basically, it was preferred. this was quite an unexpected result after the discussion where it was an adamant opinion that coke was more flavorsome. I suppose the effective advertising and marketing of coke is evidently subconsciously convincing people they prefer its brand. this is why I have to get my head around this perception thing... until next week... peace out... x

First entry

So today was my first official lesson with Ruth post freshers week. A range of comical discussions took place with regards to perception. An experiment involving paint colours and target audiences took place where, in groups of 4, we created names for each shade of paint colour in order to tempt our target consumer. We were produced with a target of well-off and retired. Through discussion we came to a conclusion for each colour, for example, clotted cream for off white, which, i feel would induce a slight melancholy in the this age group as they would have been in the times of trips to the british sea side for a holiday and cream teas as a high light. also, for a light brown, we decided on cafe creme. this is simply due to the fact that a large proportion of visitors to the south if france are retired, middle class couples. so this colour would, perhaps, remind them of holidays abroad. we then looked at the model of buyer behaviour and the buyer decision process. we ended the lesson on how the senses are addressed in advertising, such as sound effects and song; and what feelings they provoke.




“Perception is the process of sensing, selecting & interpreting consumer stimuli in the external world” (Wilkie 1994)

“Perception is how we see the world around us” (Schiffman & Kanuk 2003)