- Sensation: immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth,

fingers) to basic stimuli such as light, colour, sound, odor and texture
- Perception: process by which people select, organize and interpret these sensations
- Study of perception: what we add to raw sensations in order to give them meaning
- Overview of the perceptual process

- Hedonic consumption: multisensory, fantasy and emotional aspects of consumers

interactions with products
- Sensory marketing: companies pay extra attention to the impact of sensations on our
product experience
- Trade dress: color combinations associated with a corporation
- Kansei engineering: philosophy that translates customers feelings into design elements
- Exposure: stimulus comes within the range of someones sensory receptors
- Psychophysics: science that focuses on how the physical environment is integrated
into our personal subjective world
- Absolute threshold: minimum amount of stimulation that can be detected on a given
sensory channel.
- Differential threshold: ability of a sensory system to detect changes/differences
between two stimuli. This is relative
- Just noticeable difference (j.n.d): minimum difference we can detect between 2
stimuli.
- Weber's Law: Amount of change required for the perceiver to notice a change is
systematically related to the intensity of the original stimulus. The stronger the initial
stimulus the greater a change must be for us to notice it

- Rule of thumb for retailers→ a markdown should be at least 20% for the
reduction to make an impact on shoppers
- Perceive value of price based on leftmost digit. $4.99 → $4.50 → $3.99

- Subliminal perception: occurs when the stimulus is below the level on the consumers
awareness (limen subliminal)
 - Embeds: tiny figures that are inserted into magazine advertising by using high
speed photography or airbrushing. These hidden figures, usually of sexual
nature, supposedly exert strong but unconscious influences on innocent readers
- Attention: extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus
- Sensory overload: exposed to far more information than they can process
- Algorithm on social media to reduce this
- Rich media: elements of the ad surprise you with movement
- Perceptual selection: people attend to only a small portion of the stimuli to which they
are exposed
- Psychic economy: picking and choosing among stimuli to avoid being overwhelmed
- Mere Exposure Effect: People tend to develop preference for things because they have
been previously exposed to it
- Personal selection factors
- Experience - result of acquiring and processing stimulation over time
- Perceptual filters - based on our past experiences influence what we decide to
process
- Perceptual vigilance - more likely to be aware of stimuli that relate to their
current need
- Perceptual defense - people see what they want to see and dont see what they
dont want to see
- Adaptation - degree to which consumers continue to notice a stimulus overtime
- Factors that lead to adaptation
- Intensity
- Duration
- Discrimination - simple stimuli hatituate because they di not
require attention to detail
- Exposure
- Relevance
- Stimulus selection factors
- Size
- Colour
- Position
- Novelty - stimuli that appear in unexpected ways tend to grab our attention
- Interpretation: meaning that we assign to sensory stimuli
- Schema: set of beliefs to which we assign it
- Priming: certain properties of a stimulus evoke a schema
- Gestalt: people interpret meaning gtom the totality of a set of stimuli rather than from
individual stimulus
- Principles
- Closure principle - people tend to perceive an incomplete picture as
complete. We tend to fill in the blanks based on our prior experience
- Principle of similarity - consumer tend to group together objects that
share similar physical characteristics
 - Figure ground principle: one part of a stimulus will dominate (the figure)
and other parts recede into the background (the ground)
- Semiotics: study of the correspondence between signs and symbols and their roles in
how we assign meaning
- From a semiotics perspective, every marketing message has 3 basic
components
- Object - product that is the focus of the message
- Sign/symbol
- Interpretant - meaning derived
- Icon - sign that resembles the product in some way
- Index - sign that is connected to a product because they share some property
- Symbol - sign that relates to a product by either conventional or agreed-upon
association
- Hyperreality - process of making real what is initially stimulation or “hype”
- Perceptual map - a vivid way to paint a picture of where products or brands are located
in consumers minds
- Positioning strategy - fundamental component of a companies marketing efforts as it
uses elements of the marketing mix (4 Ps)
- Dimensions to carve out brand position
- Lifestyle
- Price leadership
- Attributes
- Product class
- Competitors
- Occasions
- Users
- Quality