Chapter-11: Information Processing

Chapter-11: Information Processing

Overview:

It is often helpful to view consumers as problem solvers who use information in an attempt to satisfy their consumption goals. From this perspective, consumer information processing may be thought of as the acquisition of stimulus inputs, the manipulation of these inputs to derive meaning from them, and the use of this information to think about products or services. More specifically, five of the major ways in which consumers use information derived from their environment are:

(i)                 To understand and evaluate products and services.

(ii)               To attempt to justify previous product choices.

(iii)             To resolve the conflict between buying or postponing purchases.

(iv)             To satisfy a need for being informed about products and services in the marketplace.

(v)               To solve as a reminder to purchase products that must be regularly replenished (soap, beverages, and the like).

Information Acquisition:

The term information acquisition describes the set of activities or means by which consumers are exposed to various environmental stimuli and begin to process them. Exposure occurs in two major ways: when consumers are motivated to actively seek information and when they passively receive these stimuli that are confronted in daily activities.

Active search: Consumers often actively seek and selectively acquire information that has potential usefulness for achieving their consumption goals. The first stage in this process appears to be internal search, because of the relative ease with which it can be accomplished compared to external search. Internal search involves scanning memory for stored information that is relevant to the purchase situation under consideration. This available information has been previously acquired from passive reception experiences as well as through active external search.

Consequently, it can include information derived from advertising claims, personal experiences, product test reports, previous solutions to similar purchase problems, and interactions with other consumers. If the consumer is not satisfied with his existing knowledge, he becomes sufficiently motivated to engage in external search. The amount of external search varies considerably across individuals and different purchase situations.

Factors affecting this include: (i) market conditions such as price, and feature differences between brands, (ii) situational factors including conditions of store crowding and urgency of need, (iii) buying strategies that consumers may adopt such as brand or store loyalty patterns, and (iv) individual factors including the level of involvement and self-confidence.

Passive reception: In this mode, consumers confront and acquire information in the process of living their daily lives. For example, when watching a TV program, casually talking to a friend, or search for a literature, one can be exposed to some kind or relevant information. This information might be stored away for a future time when the need to address the particular issue arises.

Sensation: The exposure mechanisms of active search and passive reception produce many more stimuli than the consumer is capable of processing. Two of the gate-keeping mechanisms that reduce this blooming confusion to more manageable proportions involve consumers’ physiological limitations. Awareness thresholds: Any given stimulus may be either too small or weak to notice, or so great that it also escapes awareness. The minimum value of a stimulus capable of being consciously notices is called absolute thresholds and the maximum value of a stimulus capable of being consciously noticed is called terminal thresholds. Differential thresholds: it defines the sensitivity as the smallest detectable difference between two values of the same stimulus. Many sellers have made changes in their offerings only to find that they are unnoticed in the marketplace.

Attention: One consumer may expose to thousands of stimuli in a day, but sensory processes selectively filter stimuli for information processing. Such filtering mechanism is attention. Generally, the more processing capacity that is devoted to a stimulus, the greater will be the consumer’s awareness and comprehension of it. Voluntary attention: in voluntary attention, stimuli are deliberately focused on because of their relevance to the task at hand. Involuntary attention: Involuntary attention occurs when the consumer confronts novel or unexpected stimuli that seem interesting or distinctive in some way, even though they may be unrelated to the current goal or activity at hand.

Characteristics of Attention: (i) Consumers can only attend to a limited number of items at any one time. This limit appears to be form five to seven chunks of information in which a chunk is an organized grouping of data or informational inputs. (ii) Many stimuli require attention to be processed, while other that are very familiar to the consumer do not. Because of the span of attention is limited, those stimuli that require attention cannot all be processed at the same time. (iii) Attention can be allocated to stimuli on a rapid basis.

Selective Attention: stimulus factors: Certain characteristics of stimuli themselves attract attention. Generally, these include emotion-arousing properties (like colors, pleasant phrases), physically intense values (such as loud noises, bright colors), and novel or surprising characteristics. More specifically, color, novelty and contrast, size and position, humor and a wide variety of other stimulus factors have been employed to attract consumers’ attention.

Selective attention: Individual factors: In addition to stimulus characteristics, individual attributes of consumers themselves also influence whether a given stimulus will receive attention. Some of these individual factors are attention span (number of items processed at any time), adaptation (gradual adjustment of stimuli), perceptual vigilance (consumers’ heightened sensitivity to stimuli that are capable of satisfying motives or stimuli that are personally relevant and generate higher levels of involvement) and defense (decreasing the awareness of threatening stimuli).

Perceptual Encoding:

Sensation generated by stimuli are only a series of electrical impulses, they must be transformed into a type of language that is understandable to the consumer. The process is perceptual encoding, which is the process of assigning mental symbols to sensations. These symbols can be words, numbers, pictorial images, or other representations that consumer use to interpret or assign meaning to their sensations. The manner in which stimuli are encoded will be influenced by a number of factors including the individual’s ability to process the sensations, his motivation to process them, and the opportunity (adequate time etc.) to process them.

Stages in the Encoding Process: Two major activities involved in encoding appear to be feature analysis and a synthesis stages. In feature analysis, the consumer identifies main stimulus features and assesses how they are organized. In the synthesis stage, organized stimulus elements are combined with other information available in the environment and in memory to develop an interpretation of the stimulus.

Major aspects of the stimulus will influence the interpretation process. To this must be added the stimulus contest. That is, the stimulus being focused on in any particular situation is surrounded by a wide variety of other stimuli, which form a contest that can significantly influence our interpretation of the so-called focal stimuli. The consumer’s knowledge and experience will also strongly influence how he interprets a stimulus situation.

Factors Influencing Feature Analysis: A wide variety of factors influence the encoding process. Much of the feature analysis involves mentally arranging sensations into a coherent pattern. 

(i) Figure-ground: The figure appears to stand out as being in front of the more distant background and the figure is perceived to have form and to be more substantial than the ground. Print advertisements frequently employ figure-ground techniques to assist readers in organizing symbols and other material that the marketer deems most important.

(ii) Proximity: In this process, items close to each other in time or space tend to be perceived as being related, while separated item are viewed as being different. Soft drinks and fast foods are usually shown being enjoyed in active, fun-oriented settings.

(iii) Similarity: Items that are perceived as being similar to one another will tend to be grouped together. Thus, in turn, can influence the pattern one perceives in a conglomeration of items. Some companies attempt to have developed certain style similarities between their products and their competitors.

(iv) Closure: Frequently, consumers’ organized incomplete stimuli by perceiving the as complete figures. A figure such as an open circle would tend to be filled in by the individual to result in perception of a whole.

Factors Influencing Synthesis Stage: Many additional factors influences how consumers develop meaning from stimuli that have undergone feature analysis. The major effect of these influences is to predispose the individual toward interpreting stimuli in a certain way.

(i) Learning: Learning influences consumers to categorize stimuli by developing their abilities to identify stimulus attributes used in discrimination and leveling.

(ii) Personality and motivation: Study findings explain that certain products may be highly valued by some groups of consumers and deemed rather useless by others because of personality and motivation.

(iii) Attitudes: Attitudes act as frames of references, which affect consumers’ tendencies to interpret stimuli from the environment.

(iv) Adoption level: Consumer tends to adopt rather than constant stimulus levels.

Marketing Implications:

(i) Product factors: We would expect that product evaluations are at least in part based on consumers’ attempt to directly evaluate physical product attributes, often called intrinsic cues, such as size, shape, and grade of ingredients.

(ii) Price consideration: Psychological pricing and price vs product quality are important. Consumers appear to use price as an indicator of product quality. Buyers tend to develop a range of acceptable prices around the standard.

(iii) Company and store image: A store and company image can increase consumers’ confidence in its products and predisposition to purchase them.

(iv) Advertising issues: The use of sexually attractive models and sexually suggestive themes in advertising has a long history. This issue is an alarming concern for the marketers. 

• Consumer Behavior @ Md. Akteruzzaman, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Chittagong University