Concepts and
Applications Blended: Some Examples
(Selected
Excerpts from MYCBBook)
INSTRUMENTAL
LEARNING
Or How a Pigeon Learns to Peck
The second learning
mechanism takes us to other animals. Psychologist B.F. Skinner experimented
with pigeons. He built two doors in a pigeon feed box, one fake and one real.
Peck on the fake one and nothing happens; peck on the real one and food grains
fall out. After a few trials, the pigeons learned to peck on the correct door.
This is instrumental learning (also called instrumental conditioning or
operant conditioning)—a process where one learns to act in a certain way that
is rewarding. That is, we learn a response because it is instrumental to
obtaining a reward. This is the familiar way we get children to learn good
behaviors—“eat your vegetables and you’ll get desert,” we tell them.
Can marketers use this method to help
consumers learn? Absolutely. By rewarding the consumer if he or she buys the
marketer’s brand. Buy my product, and you get a chance to win a prize. Shop at
my store, and you get “double your coupon” deal. Use my credit card, and you
get some cash back. Fly my airline, and you earn loyalty points good for a free
trip–in fact this is how your friend Christčle must have learned to always fly
with Delta Airlines.
This reward comes in two forms: extrinsic
and intrinsic. An extrinsic reward is external to the product, e.g.,
coupons, sweepstakes, rebates, and loyalty programs such as frequent flyer or
frequent hotel stay rewards. Cigna, an insurance company offers incentives to
get its members to engage in pro-health behaviors. In contrast, an intrinsic
reward is the reward built into the product itself—consumers learn to buy
and use a product because they find the product itself rewarding. For example,
we learn to use Bed Head shampoo because it renders our hair just the
way we want, and we learn to drink Fruitopia because we savor its taste. We learn
to visit the video game arcade Gameworks because we have a good time
there, and to buy Twelve Girls Band’s new CDs because we find their music enchanting.
FIGURE Omitted
This distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic rewards is important to marketers. If the product is not, in itself,
rewarding to the consumer (or not any more rewarding than competitors’
products), then, to get the consumer to buy their product, marketers have to
resort to extrinsic rewards such as coupons, rebates, and frequent buyer
rewards. However, consumer patronage won through such giveaways is rarely
lasting. Rather than luring consumers by constant rebates and promotions, as
marketers we should instead make our product itself intrinsically rewarding to
the consumer. That way, the consumer buys our product not merely because of a
coupon or sale (an extrinsic reward), but because he or she likes our product
itself more. That is, as marketers, we have to get the consumer to learn to
respond primarily to our product, not to extrinsic rewards. Frequency award
programs, and indeed all extrinsic rewards, should serve, at best, as
proverbial icing on the cake, but the real lure should be the cake itself.
MEMO: By the way, this distinction between Extrinsic and Intrinsic rewards for Instrumental conditioning is New in this book; or at least that is what some reviewers have told us.
(From MYCBBook, Chapter 11) www.mycbbook.com
* * * * * * *
A Selection from:
CONSUMER DECISION MAKING
The Privilege of Choosing, the Hassle
of Knowing How To
Step
2: Information Search
Okay, so you have, as consumers, recognized the need—like you need to do something about your thinning hair. What do you do next? Next, you search for solutions. This stage is called information search. Here, you seek out information, first, about what alternatives are available in the marketplace and then about various features of these alternatives. On the face of it, the process looks simple and straightforward. But there is more to it. For starters, it takes two forms, depending on how novel for you the problem is, i.e., how familiar you are with the solution product category.
If you are totally unfamiliar with the solution product for your problem, (e.g., thinning hair), then this is how you would most likely proceed: you find out about one alternative, learn a little about it, then come to know of a second alternative, learn a bit about it, then a third, and a fourth, and then you explore these a bit more, learning more about them, going back and forth from one alternative to another. At this stage you might begin to explore yet another, new alternative, or explore the three or four that you have identified. Eventually, there comes a time when you feel that you have explored enough—i.e., you have done enough information search.
For your thinning hair, for example, through information search, you might have discovered (one by one) some special shampoos, some herbal medicines, and the prescription medicine Propecia. You might explore two or three shampoos, or a couple of herbal medicines closely, and so on.
Suppose you want to buy a car. Here, the product category is familiar to you, so the information search focuses on your examining the familiar alternatives in more detail. However, you would rarely perform an information search on all the brands you are familiar with, much less all the brands in existence. Rather, you would consider only a select subset of brands. In fact, consumer researchers believe that brands are organized in your mind as follows (see Figure 11.4):
·
First, there is the awareness
set – which comprises all the brands you are aware of as a consumer.
·
Next, at the time of decision-making, you remember only a subset of the
brands in the awareness set. This subset is called an evoked set. The brands you
don’t remember at the time of the decision are called an inert set.
·
Of the brands in the evoked set, not all are deemed fit for your needs.
Those considered unfit are called the inept set and are eliminated right
away. The remaining brands are termed the consideration
set—the brands you, as a consumer, will consider buying.
Figure 11.4 AWARENESS, inert, EVOKED, inept, and CONSIDERATION SETS
[Figure Omitted]
Try this for yourself. Quick, what brands of low fat candy come to your mind? Which ones would you consider buying? And what can marketers do to make you think of their candy brand when you think of candy bars?
Please put my
brand into your consideration set
Initially, consumers seek information about the consideration set of brands--which is a subset of evoked sets. New information can bring additional brands into the awareness, evoked, and consideration sets. It should be the minimum objective of all marketing communications to place the brand in its target consumers’ consideration set (rather than merely in the "awareness or evoked set"). This is accomplished by highlighting a feature of the brand that its target consumers will find desirable. For example, SmartWater is a brand of bottled water enhanced with electrolytes, so it rehydrates you quickly after, say, a lie-detector test (see www.glaceau.com). By mentioning it, we have placed SmartWater into your awareness set. By mentioning that it is laced with electrolytes, we may have succeeded in placing it into your consideration set as well. Or maybe not. It is for you to decide. If we did, then now you know what it takes for marketers to put their brand into the consumer’s consideration set. In essence, marketers have to offer, in advertising and in fact, a brand feature that the consumer will hopefully find valuable.
For net savvy consumers, the concepts of awareness and consideration sets work somewhat differently. If you are a net savvy consumer, and if you wanted to search cell phones, for example, you could go to the Radio Shack Website (www.RadioShack.com) and find information on cell phones supported by five wireless service providers: Sprint, Verizon, Alltel, Cingular, and US Cellular. Click on “Sprint” and you will see twelve cell phones; ditto if you click on “Verizon”; and thirteen more if you click the combined link for the other three (some alternatives overlap, but many don’t). Given that the list of available alternatives is available on Websites, consumers do not have to depend on their memory (called “internal memory,” as we described in Chapter 4). Instead they can depend on Websites (which here serve as “external memory”) to store all the brand names.
In the Web information environment, therefore, the concept of awareness and evoked sets should give way to what we call the “Recognition set”—the brand names the consumer recognizes as being familiar. The consideration set would be a subset of the “recognition set,” although occasionally, the consumer might read up on information on a completely new brand and admit it into the consideration set. The consideration set will, however, be a much smaller subset of the recognition set, selected most likely on the basis of brand-name reputation, and often if the product picture looks attractive. On the Radio Shack Website, for example, the consumer would find more than 25 cell phones to view, but it is unlikely that he or she would view more than, say, ten of them. Most consumers would initially view at most five or six, before examining two or three in greater detail. Given the help from the “external memory” of the Web, the recognition set would be at least a little larger than the evoked set of the offline information environment, and consideration set is also likely to be somewhat larger.
Perhaps you realize that it is easy to find information on cell phones; especially if you are net savvy. But information on other products is not as easy to come by. Try finding information, for example, on low-carb foods, on remedies for thinning hair, or on tennis rackets with liquidmetal frames. And try finding it in the offline world! Where would you begin? How much time and effort would you be willing to expend? And what would that depend on? Your interest in the product? Your mood? Or what?
Fortunately, consumer researchers have addressed these questions. Let us try to understand them, too, in this order:
(From MYCBBook, Chapter 11) www.mycbbook.com
* * * * * * *
Chapter 18
Consumer Relationships with Brands: Loyalty, Romance, and Brand Tribes
Brand Personality—The Source of Consumers’ Identification with the Brand
Beyond performance, what is needed for brand loyalty is the brand’s ability to connect with consumers. So that consumers may identify themselves with the brand. This happens when consumers feel that the brand has the same or similar personality as they themselves do.
People have personalities, of course, as we saw in an earlier chapter; but do brands have personalities, too? To answer this question, let us begin with a quiz. Below is a list of qualities, or personality traits, we associate with people. Following this list is a set of brands in a few product categories (cars, soft drinks, clothing, etc.); can you match individual brands in each product category with the following qualities?
A. Sincere
B. Exciting
C. Competent
D. Sophisticated
E. Rugged
Cars Drinks Clothes Misc.
Mercedes Root Beer Gap WSJ
Honda Coke Nike Kodak
Rav4 Snapple Banana Republic Apple Computer
Blazer Perrier Lands’
End
How did you do? Most people would assign various cars to the qualities list (in the order of ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, and ‘E’) as Saturn, Rav4, Honda, Mercedes, and Blazer. Likewise, soft drinks as: Coke (A), Snapple (B), Gatorade (C), Perrier (D), and Root Beer (E). We’ll leave clothing and other items for you to explore. As this trivia should convince you, products and brands do have personalities—that is, as consumers, we do see brands and products as possessing personalities.
If we describe ourselves and other people by certain qualities, known as personality traits, and as consumers if we use products and brands to convey the type of person we are, it makes sense that we would begin to also describe products and brands by the same human traits. Thus, just like people are cool, urbane, macho, aggressive, fun, and contemporary, so too are brands. Brand personality refers to the set of human qualities by which consumers describe a brand. Obviously, different consumers may see the brand differently, and thus, brand personality, as seen by consumers, may vary from consumer to consumer. The question is, just what are the dimensions of brand personality.
A brand can be described by numerous qualities (good or bad), amounting to hundreds if not thousands. Many of these brand personality descriptors may be mere synonyms (e.g., cool and trendy) and many others closely related (e.g., prestigious and classy). Stanford University marketing professor Jennifer Aaker analyzed a battery of such descriptors consumers use for brands and came up with a manageable set of overarching dimensions—Five Brand Personality Dimensions. You can remember these by the acronym SECTS if you paraphrase “rugged” as “tough.” That these dimensions are also five in number, just like the Big Five of human personality (see Chapter 5, where they were nick-named OCEAN), is a happy coincidence. And an intuitive reading also shows a broad correspondence of individual dimensions within OCEAN and SECTS:
Conscientiousness is Competence; Agreeableness is
Sincerity; Openness and Extraversion crisscross over Excitement (Excitement is
more Openness but also a little Extraversion) and Sophisticated (Sophisticated
is more extraverted but also a little over Openness); finally, neuroticism’s
opposite, stability, is like ruggedness (a rugged object is stable). Remember,
rather than being exact, the correspondence is intuitive, broad, and suggestive.
…………………………………………..
Sincere—down-to-earth, family oriented, genuine, old-fashioned.
Exciting—spirited, young, up-to-date, outgoing.
Competent—accomplished, influential, high-performing.
Rugged—athletic and outdoorsy.
Sophisticated—pretentious, wealthy, condescending
——————————————————————————————
SECTS: The Five Dimensions of Brand Personality.
Source: Adapted from Building Strong Brands, David Aaker, Free Press, 1995
——————————————————————————————
Measuring
Brand Personality
Measuring brand personality using SECTS is easy. Each dimension of SECTS is scored by a set of six adjectives as shown in the Table 18.4. The scores can then be profiled for any brand or a set of brands for comparison.
Source: Adapted from Jennifer Aaker, Dimensions of Brand Personality, Journal of Marketing Research, Summer 1997, Vol. 34, 347-57.
………
CB
Tutor 18.1. Brand Personality = Brand
Image (NOT!)
A clarification is in order. Brand
personality is not the same as brand image. What is the difference? Brand image consists of all the
associations or qualities associated with a brand, which includes physical
qualities (e.g., cold, runny, porous, dark, transparent, etc.) and functional
qualities (e.g., sucks more dirt, zaps zits, blocks spam, autodials missed
caller, etc.), in addition to human qualities; however, only human qualities
count as brand personality. Thus, brand personality is a subset of brand image.
…………………
How Brands Acquire Personality
How do brands acquire their personality? There are at least three sources:
1. Marketer Communications. Intentionally, marketers convey to consumers certain symbolic brand images: they depict their brands in association with certain people (e.g., celebrities like Tiger Woods), person-images (e.g., cowboy for Marlboro cigarettes), or human-like animated characters (e.g., Pillsbury Doughboy). One recent trend in brand personality advertising is to display a brand and human model side by side with striking visual similarity–as done by recent print ads for Tag Heuer. For want of a term, we would call it homophyly, which the dictionary defines as “resemblance arising out of common ancestry,” but which we will here define as “resemblance arising out of love and identification.”
—————-Ad for Tag Heuer Watch here ————
Other marketer-managed signals also promote the intended brand personality. Indeed, all other elements of the marketing mix build a brand’s personality. The brand’s name, logo, price, packaging, and even the store where the brand is sold contribute to the brand’s personality. Brand name Obsession gives the cologne ruggedness, while Eternity makes it sincere even though both colognes are from the same maker, Calvin Klein. Indeed, some of these elements of marketing mix are a way of giving tangible form to the intended brand personality. Visit, for example, a M.A.C Cosmetics store, and see how young store associates are “decorated” M.A.C style; more than anything else, these visual ambassadors personify the trendy, edgy, exciting personality of the brand.
2. Consumers’ Social Observations. In their everyday life, consumers observe who is using what products, and then assign the qualities of the brand’s users to the brand. Thus, if consumers see a lot of urban youth wearing Diesel brand jeans and clothing, then Diesel will acquire, in the consumer eye, the personality of being urban and youthful. If consumers also see these same youth (donning Diesel outfits) with conservatively well kempt hair, driving nice cars and patronizing upscale restaurants and clubs, then they would attribute to Diesel the personality of rich, yuppie, fashionable, sophisticated, urbane, and youthful (sort of like Banana Republic or Kenneth Cole brands). On the other hand, if they were to see the Diesel youth donning punk rock hairdos and tattoos, then the personality attributed to Diesel would be rebellious, unorthodox, on-the-edge and youthful (sort of like the brand personality of Hot Topic and Torrid clothing lines).
3. Cultural Gatekeepers. In every culture, there are a number of public figures that influence the image of activities, ideas, and products. By adopting a product (without commercial gains from the marketer), by displaying it through personal use, by taking a position on it, by praising it or critiquing it, these cultural gatekeepers inevitably define and influence the brand image for the rest of us.
Two examples will illustrate this: Nike’s Air Force One and Menolo Blahnik.
Air Force One. No, we are not talking about the presidential plane. We are talking about Nike’s basketball shoe designed in 1981. By itself it is so plain (a thick sole, some vent air holes on the top, and a Velcro ankle strap) that unless you knew of it already, you won’t give it a second look. And while it endured for two decades—thanks to an occasional lift from hip-hop celebrities—it achieved a cult status in November 2001 when rapper Nelly made it the theme of his single, appropriately titled “Air Force One,” which became an instant hit. Some lyrics in it include: “You couldn’t get this color if you had a personal genie. I am a sneaker pro, I love Pumas and shelltoes. But can’t nothin’ compare to a fresh crispy white pair…” While the company (Nike) has occasionally brought out limited editions of other colors, the white-on-white, the subject of Nelly’s paean, is now the most coveted shoe among hip-hop fans and pretenders alike.
(Adapted from Maureen Tracik, “Why This Season’s Hot Sneaker Is Nowhere to Be Found,” Wall Street J., December 10, 2002, B1.)
Manolo Blahnik. The designer of this high fashion shoe is one of the most revered shoe designers of the century, but that doesn’t put it on the consumer’s wish list. Rather it is the roaster of its famous fans—Madonna, Patti Labelle, and Winona Ryder. Of course, what really expanded its circle of admirers is its frequent appearance on the fashionable TV show Sex and the City.
Consumer
Relationships with Brands
So, by now, you have gained
an intense knowledge of consumer loyalty toward brands. You can separate
consumers who would stick with your brand no matter what, from those who would
ditch you in a heartbeat just to get a 25-cent promotional deal. As a brand
marketer, you also know what factors enhance brand loyalty and what factors
diminish it.
(Rest
omitted..)
(From MYCBBook, Chapter 18) www.mycbbook.com
This has been a MYCBBOOK
Presentation. Thank you for reading.
MYCBBook—the World’s Second Most Interesting Book on Consumer Behavior