Introduction
The purpose of this short report is to discuss the selective attention process and further to that discuss how it affects consumers.
Every decision a consumer makes, whether to purchase or not, will be influenced by a number of factors. Consumers today experience a wide variety of messages (stimuli) from marketers across many different mediums.
It is the consumers’ ability to decide whether to accept or reject which messages resonate with them according to their own needs, wants and other lifestyle factors that form the basis for selective attention.
In particular Avery & Baker’s explanation of the late selection theory of selective attention allows consumers to make decisions of selection or rejection of stimuli after they have been presented with the information.[i] This will be discussed in more detail later in this report with an example of the importance of colours in branding across the key competitors in the Australian mobile phone industry.
Selective Attention
Selective attention can be described as the situation where consumers maintain a heightened awareness of stimuli that meet their needs or interests and conversely hold a lower awareness of stimuli that are irrelevant to their needs[ii].
Avery & Baker defined two clear theories of selective attention: Broadbent’s 1958 early selection theory, which limits consumers’ ability to process multiple stimuli at any one time; and, Triesman’s 1969 late selection theory, which is currently favoured now by both Broadbent and Triesman and instead allows for a primary and secondary ‘channel’ where a consumers’ attention may be taken from their first stimuli to another in the event of something significant.
To extend from Triesman’s theory are concepts about the two key ways in which a consumer may address information they are presented with. Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) suggest that predictable or familiar situations are dealt with in an automatic way, while stimuli that is new or constantly changing is controlled by the person focussing on that stimuli.
Colour, branding and consumers
In many cases a brand, or even product, may be associated to a colour that holds a certain personality trait; this concept of brand personality, as discussed by Schiffman, Kanuk and others (1997) sees consumers give human like qualities to brands and products. [iii]
The colours used by competing companies in the establishment of their brand are an important contributing factor in relation to the way customers select stimuli to accept or reject. As we will see in the below example some colours may align with brands that customers aspire to be aligned with, while others are relevant to consumers who may belong to a wider social group or ‘tribe’.
...s, B. M., and W. Stroebe. (2010) “Setting the stage.” The Psychology of Advertising. East Sussex: Psychology, Print.
It is often thought that humans can receive all the information that invades their senses, however, it is fact they are not able to process all of the received information. Humans must selectively choose what information to perceive and ignore irrelevant information. Two questions are raised, therefore: what allows us to selectively attend information and what happens to unattended information, is it proceeded to any extend or not proceeded at all? Recently, the phenomenon of negative-priming started to be used to study selective attention.
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
consumerism can be hugely related to the human phsychology.people want variety and are attracted to it when presented a range of products.furthermore attractive and idealistic advertisements pull potential customers further into the world of consumerism.from 20 different types of cereal to 35
A popular subject within psychology is that of selective attention, particularly visual, auditory or visual and auditory attention (Driver, 2001). There are many theories of visual and auditory attention that provide us with a greater understanding of the ways in which humans attend to different stimuli (Driver, 2001), such as Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention for example. This essay will compare and contrast theories of visual and auditory attention as well as discussing how well these theories explain how we attend to objects. The essay will consist of three auditory attention theories of Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s (1964) attenuation theory, and Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection model of attention; and two models of visual attention known as the spotlight model, such as Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) feature integration model, and the zoom-lens model of visual attention (see Styles, 2006).
More importantly, the decision to purchase is done subconsciously. This means that the majority of the time, your consumer is not even aware of their decision to buy or not to buy your product. In fact,
... of consumer behaviour, lays emphasis on the objectivity of science and the consumer as a reasonable and sensible decision maker. While, the interpretive point of view is in contrast to that of the positivist, in that it emphasises on the importance of the subjective meaning of the consumers individual experience, hence, it suggest that whichever behaviour a consumer performs is subject to diverse interpretations to a certain extent than just a single explanation to it.
Whether [the people influenced by the advertisement] like it or not, products play a role in
It was during this time when critics, fueled by Cold war era paranoia, claimed that “mind control techniques” were being used to persuade the public into spending. (History: 1950s) In reality, this was because of the use of motivational research. Using psychology, this allowed advertisers to appeal to their consumer’s desires for acceptance, security, sex, and success. By analyzing buying habits and people’s attitudes towards products, advertisers could gauge which ads were more successful based on brand association, color, and packaging. Advertising research has confirmed that ads “emphasizing the aroma, taste, or texture of a food product […] establish their product as the relevant one for the consumer making a choice.” (Marchand xx) By using similar techniques on non-food items, those products become associated with the primal reactions of taste and
Every company wants to understand why people decide to buy its products or others. Firstly, we have to understand why people buy certain kind of product. People buy products because they need them. A need is activated and felt when there is a sufficient discrepancy between a desired or preferred state of being and the actual state. (Engle£¬Blackwell and Miniard. 1995. p407 ) For example, when you feel hungry, what you needs is some food. It is very important for marketer to understand the needs of consumers. All the consumers may have the same needs, but the ways which they satisfy what they need are different. Here is a example, Chinese people would choose rice when they feel hungry, whilst British people may choose bread to satisfy their needs.
... The need to fulfill these desires is a tricky battle between the advertisement and consumer.
1. Marketers have to pay attention to consumer behavior that occurs before the purchase and continues after the product has been used.
Therefore, in order to predict how consumers will react to a message, we must correlate behavior with share of mind.
Sensory branding affects the brain by engaging the sensory organs (taste, smell, sight, sound and touch). Brands can’t impart an an aroma via a television or newspaper. In fact, the unique aroma, texture and sound has very little to do with the performance of the product. However, these factors play a great role by the communication between consumer and product. The sensory stimulation not only attracts consumer decisions but also helps distinguish a product from others. These get linked in our memory and finally get a part of our choice.
Stage two is the attention given to the advertisement. Attention refers to the extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus. Interesting advertisements are obviously more effective than less interesting advertisements because they are more likely to stick in your mind. One thing that can can often mess with your perception is sensory overload. We live in an “information society,” but there can be too much of a good thing. Sensory overload is where we are exposed to far more information than we can process. In our society, much of this overload comes from competition between advertisers for our