Secret Behind The Perfect Burger

Perception is a powerful tool. It is essentially what consumers think of a product or company and becomes the deciding factor of going with a certain brand over another. The simplest way to figure out how to target consumers’ perception is by narrowing it down to their 5 sensory systems. The first one that interests me was the use of smell. Smell is a dangerous game to play because a bad smell is much more easily detected than a good smell. However, if done right, a good manipulation of smell can give you success akin to the Subway franchise. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever followed a mate in to a Subway restaurant just after a meal at home and with no intention at all to eat, but then suddenly is hit by that wave of Subway bread smell. That smell would eventually somehow magically make all the food I’ve already consumed disappear and make me want to buy a Subway sandwich. In this article by Roston (2011), he noticed how opinions can be drastically divided when it came to the Subway smell. Some saying it smells like “little elves baking perfect treats” while others say it tastes like plastic.

Moving away from the topic of smell, the use of hearing, feeling, and tasting is pretty straightforward in terms of perception in my opinion. Taste is tricky to negotiate because just like smell, it can vary differently from person to person. Touch and sound have often been attributed to building perceptions during face-to-face conversations. A salesperson for a perfume or fabric usually would have soft voices as they speak delicately and keep the mood mellow while a car salesperson would need to sound confident and assertive just like the product he/she is promoting.

But the one sensory system that is used the most often is also the one I find the most interesting, and it is that of vision/sight. Because we base so much of our perception on what we see, this is by far the most important sensory system to tackle. This is why people spend that extra 50-60 quid trying to repair little bumps and knocks on a second hand car before trying to offload it while making no difference to the car quality at all. This is also why millions of dollars are invested into graphic designs and company logos and product packaging, because ultimately a consumer would base majority of his/her decisions on sight.

Expanding on that, the one use of visionary manipulation I find the most interesting is the burgers that fast food chains such as McDonalds put on their TV ads and menus. I’m pretty certain everyone reading this would have seen a delicious looking burger on a TV commercial only to buy that same burger the next day and be disappointed. Well, the YouTube clip attached below shows just how these burgers are made to look so delicious while the real ones they serve turn out to be so bland in comparison.

While this manipulation by big fast food chains could be argued to be ethically wrong, I actually find it interesting. Despite knowing the tricks behind it, i still feel like buying Maccas every time I walk past an outlet. So what do you readers think? Should they be allowed to trick consumers like this?

 

References

Roston, T 2011, ‘Whats behind the Subway bread smell?’, Food Republic, viewed 8 April 2014, http://www.foodrepublic.com/2011/12/07/whats-behind-subway-bread-smell

 

Rational or Emotional?

Where do people draw the line between a rational decision and an emotional decision? To quote an example from the textbook (Schiffman et. al 2010), an individual who spends ridiculous amounts of money to undergo plastic surgery to look younger and achieve his/her goals such as feeling better about their lives or to impress corporate managers could seem like a very rational decision while others may see it as a complete irrational thing to do.

This brings up the question on whether or not we are making purchases due to emotional or rational reasons. For the consumer themselves, they would obviously try to logically defend their purchasing decisions, but they could very well have been driven by an emotional factor. There are a few examples besides the one given by the textbook which blur the lines on the whole emotional and rational debate.

The first one that comes to mind was given in the lecture slides and that is purchasing a car. An expensive car could be beneficial for many reasons. Logical factors would be that it is more powerful, it can be used to impress potential clients, it maybe gets better mileage, all of those would justify spending money on a high end car. But there could also have been an emotional factor at play here, could it just be to boost the buyer’s image? Or it could have been bought just to satisfy materialistic needs.

Another example would be buying designer labels for things such as handbags, wallets, even clothes. Could these brands really all be much better quality? Are they really going to last much longer than a cheaper brand? Would buying a more expensive branded clothing boost my chances at acing a job interview? Speaking from personal experience, if there is just a small price difference between a designer labelled shirt and a regular shirt which are exactly the same, I would buy the more expensive brand even if they would probably have been the same all along. I would justify that the quality could have been better or the cutting would have more suited me but I could also say i bought it just so i could tell people i have it. So was that an emotional or rational decision?

Even in an industry such as movies, often high budget films are made with a lot of special effects and very little constructive plot lines. Many people are attracted to films like these but are afraid to admit it because they want to seem like a more cultured individual. I’m all for movies who challenge me mentally while I also enjoy a movie that just makes me feel good emotionally.

Perhaps it is a combination of both that marketers should be focusing on rather than choosing a side. Douglas Van Praet, an author for co.create wrote about how marketers should satisfy both emotional and rational factors when advertising a product. Research found that people may give any logical reason to justify their purchasing needs but not exactly believe in it. So chasing a fully focused rational marketing campaign may not attract consumers due to there being no emotional factor.

So the next time, try to catch yourself doing this. Especially when purchasing something a little more expensive, do you find yourself being attracted to it due to emotional factors, and then slowly try to justify it using logical reasoning?

Van Praet, D n.d, ‘The End of Rational vs Emotional’, co.create.com. viewed 31st March 2014,http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682962/the-end-of-rational-vs-emotional-how-both-logic-and-feeling-play-key-roles-in-marketing-and-

Schiffman, L et. al 2010, Consumer Behavior, 5th edn., Pearson Australia, New South Wales

Perceived Risks of Online Shopping

The internet may be responsible for many things in our generation such as enabling the constant sharing of information, or negative effects such as the downfall of face-to-face communication. However, there is one aspect of the internet that has rose to such heights while somehow being somewhat quiet about it. This phenomenon is that of internet shopping. Internet shopping has slowly seeped its influence into many of our lives now even more so with online banking being a thing. Having said that, there are still many who are strongly against such practices.

In the defence of the naysayers, online shopping represents a great deal of perceived risk involved. Yes sure, it has its benefits such as the accessibility of it, the save on time and petrol, and also the convenience of having so much more information online which automatically leads to consumers making better purchasing decisions. But there is a sense of risking just a little bit too much when it comes to online shopping. First of all, you are not witnessing the product for yourselves. The best you could hope for is buying from a source that has been hardworking enough to take pictures of the product from every possible angle to let you know what you’re really getting into. 2nd of all, as pointed out by (Iconaru, n.d), numerous cases of leaked personal information due to online purchasing have rightly scared off even some of the more avid buyers. Finally, buying online also increases the risk of an impulse buying phenomenon as explained in the video below:

 

Thinking back on personal experience, I do feel a sense of putting myself at risk whenever I buy something online. The most recent is having to search eBay for textbooks to use this semester. One of the textbooks i ordered took 1 week to arrive from the day it was suppose to have reached me, during that 1 week when i thought i got scammed was simply reaffirming my fears rather than creating them. Thankfully it did arrive and i can chalk that down to another successful online purchases. However not all of my experiences with online shopping have gone smoothly. A few months back I ordered a power bank from Groupon and when it arrived, it wasn’t functional. Luckily Groupon had a money back guarantee policy and I managed to get refunded, which brings me to my next point.

So how has sites such as Amazon and eBay manage to be successful despite all these perceived risks regarding online purchasing? Well as my experience with Groupon has shown, the online shopping giants have done well to understand the fears of their consumers and have instilled strict policies which protect both the sellers and the buyers involved with their sites.

eBay encourages their sellers to list the return policies of their items by saying “A Clear Returns Policy can reassure buyers.” and adding that “research shows that difficulty in returning items is the most common shopping barrier for buyers”. This shows eBay’s commitment to rid of the perceived risks that buyers may have when doing online shopping. (ebay, 2014)

Also an example is Amazon.com’s clear details of how they treat personal information. A long detailed explanation can be found on their website regarding the security of a buyer’s private information and what it can and won’t be used for. Such clear explanations would help calm the more paranoid buyers as Amazon has opened themselves up to a possibility of severe legal implications if they do not abide by their own rules. (Amazon.com, 2014)

While it is clear that online shopping is a trend that is far from perfect, it does seem like it is here to stay at the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Add that to the fact that the general perceived risks that it holds are slowly being washed away thanks to the professionalism of big shopping sites, the use of online shopping just got a lot more popular among consumers.

Amazon.com 2014, ‘Privacy Notice’, Amazon, viewed 22 March 2014, http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468496

Ebay.com 2014, ‘Specifying your returns policy’, Ebay, viewed 22 March 2014, http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/your-return-policy.html

Iconaru, C 2014, ‘Influence of Perceived Risk on Consumers Intention to Buy Online’, Academia.edu, http://www.academia.edu/2448443/The_influence_of_perceived_risk_on_consumers_intention_to_buy_online_A_meta-analysis_of_empirical_results_

YouTube’s Response To Individuality

As our world becomes more diverse due to intertwining cultures and the idea of individuality finally being embraced much more compared to a decade ago, consumers have been harder to place under black and white demographics of old. A casual conversation about a friend’s favourite music genre can go so many ways as you hear words like ‘post-grunge’ or ‘electro-pop’ or ‘rock-trance’. Even movies nowadays can be argued to be made for adults, or kids, or mid-20s, or 90’s kids. This has become an increasing difficult headache for marketers who some still live in the days where society could have been easily divided to just 3 to 4 different groups.

I found this particularly interesting as I browsed through YouTube videos. Because YouTube is known as giving the power back to the layman to create media how they want it and to whom they want it to reach out to, its interesting how different ‘YouTubers’ target different demographics or consumers. The number one most subscribed YouTuber at the moment is PewDiePie, who zooms in on the gamers market with his video game walkthroughs and reviews and sets himself apart from other similar YouTubers by making his videos hilariously entertaining rather than just being a good gamer. There’s also YouTubers like WongFu who does high scaled short films which ranges from comedy to emotional plot lines.

There are various other genres on YouTube from news channels all the way to just weekly vlogs. Most of the notable YouTubers treat it as a profitable job, and in order to do that, they would have to treat every video as a company would a product. They have to analyze and review all their viewer statistics down to the smallest of details. An analysis of their viewership would include which videos gain most popularity, which days and times during the day that they get the most traffic, and even which ‘hot spots’ in their videos get replayed the most times (Karch, n.d).

An analysis was done by a blogger (WordPress, 2014) on how PewDiePie rose to become the most subscribed YouTuber, and one of the key points made was that PewDiePie is frequently in tune with his audience as he listens to feedback and recommendations. As the world slowly becomes more diverse and individuality is encouraged at every corner, it really is difficult to produce products that makes everybody happy. Perhaps only in a medium like YouTube where content is uploaded by everyone and for everyone at a rate  – that would have been incomprehensible at the time the first book on ‘consumer research’ was written – can society’s celebration of individuality be satisfied, and even a quick look at the negative comments on a single video would beg you to differ.

References

Karch M, n.d, ‘How to find out who is watching your YouTube videos’, About.com, http://google.about.com/od/googleblogging/qt/YouTubeInsightQ.htm

Matthew, 2014, ‘3 Content market strategies PewDiePie uses to dominate YouTube’, WordPress.com,                                                                                               http://blog.rgbsocial.com/2014/02/17/3-content-marketing-strategies-pewdiepie-uses-to-dominate-youtube/