WEEK 4

CONSUMER LEARNING AND MEMORY

PSY3006 Consumer Psychology in Social Media
Internal Influences on Consumer Behaviour

Motivation &
Perception Learning & Memory
Emotion

Personality,
The Self: Mind,
Lifestyles, and
Gender, and Body
Values
WEEK 4 CONTENTS
1. Behavioural Learning Theories –
CONSUMER Conditioning results in learning
LEARNING AND
2. Cognitive Learning Theory – We
MEMORY learn about products by observing
others’ behaviour
3. Memory – Our brains process
information about brands to retain
them in memory
1
Behavioural Learning Theories –
Conditioning results in learning
Conditioning results in learning

 Learning – A relatively permanent change in behaviour

caused by experience.
 The learner need not have the experience directly,
however, we can also learn when we observe events
that affect others.
 Learning is an ongoing process.
Behavioural Learning Theories

 Behavioural Learning Theories – Learning takes place as the

result of response to external events.

 Classical Conditioning
 Instrumental Conditioning
 Classical Conditioning

 Classical Conditioning – When a stimulus that

elicits a response is paired with another stimulus
that initially does not elicit a response on its own.
Over time, this second stimulus causes a similar
response because we associate it with the first
stimulus.

 Unconditional Stimulus (UCS)

 Conditional Stimulus (CS)
 Conditional Response (CR)
Classical Conditioning

 Repetition – Repeated exposures increase the strength of stimulus-

response associations and prevent the decay of these associations in
memory.
 The effectiveness of this strategy may be influenced by: the intervals
between exposures, and the type of medium used.
 The most effective repetition strategy is a combination of spaced
exposure that alternate in terms of media that are more and less
involving, e.g. TV ad + print media.

 Extinction – When the effects of prior conditioning diminish and

finally disappeared.
Classical Conditioning

 Stimulus Generalisation – The tendency of stimuli similar to a

CS to evoke similar, conditional responses.
 Halo effect – People also react to other, similar stimuli in much
the same way they responded to the original stimulus.

 Stimulus Discrimination – When a UCS does not follow a

stimulus similar to a CS, reactions weaken and will soon
disappear.
Marketing Application of Classical
Conditioning
 The basic form of classical conditioning that Pavlov demonstrated
primarily applies to responses to visual and olfactory cues that induce
hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, and other basic drives.

 When marketers consistently pair these cues with conditional stimuli

(e.g. brand names), consumers may learn to feel hungry, thirsty, or
aroused when they encounter these brand cues at a later point.
 Classical conditioning can have similar effects in marketing for more
complex reasons too.
Marketing Application of Classical
Conditioning
Classical Conditional Principles
 When the marketer creates a distinctive brand image or links a
product to an underlying need. The transfer of meaning from a
UCS to a CS explains why “made-up” brand names (e.g. Coca
Cola, Adidas) exert such powerful effects on customers.
 Brand equity – A brand has strong positive associations in a
consumer’s memory and commands a lot of loyalty as a result.
 Marketing Application of Classical
Conditioning
Repetition
 Rule of thumb of “three exposures” in marketing communications:
 1st exposure: creates awareness of the product
 2nd exposure: demonstrates its relevance to the consumer
 3rd exposure: Reminds the consumer about the product’s benefits
 However people tend to tune out or distort many marketing communications.
 Therefore marketers have to ensure that the consumers they target will be
exposed to the stimulus a sufficient number of times to make it “stick”.

 Adverting wear-out – Consumers can become so used to hearing or seeing a

marketing stimulus that they no loner pay attention to it.
 The solution is to create variations of the same basic message.
Marketing Application of Classical
Conditioning
Conditioned Product Associations
 Advertisements often pair a product with a positive stimulus to
create a desirable association.
 Various aspects of a marketing message, such as music,
humour, or imagery, can affect conditioning.
Marketing Application of Classical
Conditioning
Stimulus Generalisation
 The process of stimulus generalisation often is central to branding and packaging
decisions that try to capitalise on consumers’ positive associations with an
existing brand or company name.
 Strategies that marketers base on stimulus generalisation include:
 Family branding – Capitalise on the reputation of a company name.
 Product line extension – Add related products to an established brand.
 Licensing – “Rent” well-known names, hoping that the learned associations they have
forged with “rub off” onto other kinds of products.
 Look-alike packaging – Put their products in packages similar to those of popular brands.
 Consumer confusion – If the copycat brand gets too close to the original, which
may cause legal actions.
 Companies with a well-established brand image try to encourage stimulus
discrimination when they promote the unique attributes of their brand.
 Instrumental Conditioning

 Instrumental Conditioning / Operant Conditioning – When we learn to perform

behaviours that produce positive outcomes and avoid those that yield negative
outcomes, in order to deliberately obtain a goal.
 Instrumental learning occurs when a learn receives a reward after he/she performs
the desired behaviour.
 Learning takes place over time, while the learner attempts and abandons other
behaviours that don’t get reinforced.
 In instrumental learning, the person makes a response because it is instrumental
to gain a reward or avoid punishment. Over time, consumers come to associate
with people who reward them and to choose products that make them feel good
or satisfy some need.
 Instrumental Conditioning

 Positive Reinforcement
 Negative Reinforcement
 Punishment

 Extinction – When a person no

longer receives a positive
outcome.
Instrumental Conditioning

 Fixed-Interval Reinforcement – After a specified time period has passed,

the first response you make brings the rewards.
 Variable-Interval Reinforcement – The time that must pass before you get
reinforced varies.
 Fixed-Ratio Reinforcement – Reinforcement occurs only after a fixed
number of responses.
 Variable-Ratio Reinforcement – The person gets reinforced after a certain
number of responses, but he/she doesn’t know how many responses are
required. People in this situations tend to respond at high and steady rates,
and this type of behaviour is difficult to extinguish.
Marketing Application of Instrumental
Conditioning
 Reactions from a person’s environment to his/her behaviour can
be either positive or negative, and that marketers can either
apply or remove these outcomes for anticipated outcomes.
 Businesspeople shape behaviour when they gradually reinforce
the appropriate actions consumers take.
 Frequency marketing – A popular technique that rewards
regular purchases with prizes that get better as they spend
more.
 Marketing Application of Instrumental
Conditioning
 Gamification - Adds gaming elements to tasks that might otherwise be boring or routine.
 Young people have grown up playing games; these activities structure their learning styles and
influence the platforms to which they will gravitate.
 Implement elements of gaming include:
 A dynamic digital environment
 Multiple short- and long- term goals
 Rapid and frequent feedback
 A reward for most or all efforts in the form of a badge or a virtual product
 Friendly competition in a low-risk environment
 A manageable degree of uncertainty
 At its most basic, gamification is simply about providing rewards to customers to encourage
them to buy even more, e.g. buy-10-get-1-free cards; but the technology nowadays (e.g.
mobile apps) enable more sophisticated design e.g. various reward scheduled within the app.
2
Cognitive Learning Theory – We learn
about products by observing others’
behaviour
 Cognitive Learning Theory

 Cognitive Learning Theory – Views people as problem-solvers who actively use the
information from the world around them to master their environments.
 This approach stresses the importance of internal mental processes.
 Observational Learning – Learning occurs when we watch the actions of others
and note the reinforcements they receive for their behaviours. In these situations,
learning occurs as a result of vicarious rather than direct experience.
 People store these observations in memory as they accumulate knowledge and
then they use this information at a later point to guide their own behaviour.
 Modelling – The process of imitating the behaviour of others.
 The modelling process is a powerful form of learning, and people’s tendencies to
imitate others’ behaviours can have negative effects.
Cognitive Learning Theory

 There is some evidence to support the existence of nonconscious

procedural knowledge.
 Mindlessness – People do process at least some information in
an automatic, passive way.
 In these cases a trigger feature – some stimulus that cues us
toward a particular pattern – activates a reaction.
Marketing Application of Cognitive Learning
Theory
 Marketers can show what happens to desirable models who use
or do not use their products; they know that consumers often
will imitate these actions at a later time.
 Consumers’ evaluations of the people they model go beyond
simple stimulus-responsive connection.
 For example, a celebrity’s image elicits more than a simple
reflexive response of good or bad. It is a complex combinations
of many attributes. In general, the degree to which a person
emulates someone else depends on that model’s level of social
attractiveness.
Marketing Application of Cognitive Learning
Theory
 Consumer Socialisation – The process by which young people acquire skills,
knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning in the marketplace.
 Research supports the proposition that the brand preferences and product
knowledge that occur in childhood persist into the later stages of consumers’
lives.
 Parents influence consumer socialisation both directly and indirectly, e.g.:
 They deliberately try to instil their own values about consumption in their
children
 They determine the degree to which their children come into contact with other
information sources e.g. TV, sales people, peers
 Adults serve as significant models for observational learning. Children learn
about consumption as they watch their parents’ behaviours and imitate them.
Marketing Application of Cognitive Learning
Theory
Parents exhibit different styles when they socialise their
children:
 Authoritarian parents: They tend to censor the types of
media their children see, and they tend to have negative
views about advertising.
 Neglecting parents: They don’t exercise much control over
what their children do.
 Indulgent parents: They communicate more with their
children about consumption-related matters and are less
restrictive. They believe that children should be allowed to
learn about the marketplace without much interference.
Marketing Application of Cognitive Learning
Theory
Cognitive Development of Young Consumers
 Marketers segment kids in terms of their stage of cognitive
development, or their ability to comprehend concepts of increasing
complexity
 Children differ in information-processing capability or the ability to
store and retrieve information from memory.
 Children are not as likely to realise that something they see on TV is
not “real”, and as a result they are more vulnerable to persuasive
message.
 Because children differ in their abilities to process product-related
information, advertisers’ direct appeals to them may raise serious
ethical issues.
3
Memory – Our brains process information
about brands to retain them in memory
Memory – Our brains process information
about brands to retain them in memory
 Memory – A process of acquiring information and storing it over time so that it will be
available when we need it.
 Information process approach that they assume the mind is in some ways like a
computer: Data are input, processed, and output for later use in revised form.
 The memory process:
a) Encoding stage: Information enters in a way that the system will recognise
b) Storage stage: Integrate this knowledge with what is already in memory
and “warehouse” it until it is needed
c) Retrieval stage: Access the desired information

 Marketers rely on consumers to retain information they collect about products and
services so they will apply it to future purchase decisions.
 We combine this internal memory with external memory when we decide what to buy.
a) Encoding

 Encoding: The way we encode, or mentally program, information helps to

determine how out brains will store this information.
 It’s more likely that we’ll retain incoming data when we associate it with
other things already in memory.
 For example,
 We tend to remember brand names that we link to physical
characteristics of a product category, or that we can easily visualise.
 Our brains automatically react to images of familiar celebrities and use
them to guide how we think about them to ascribe meaning to other
images of people or products with which they appear.
a) Encoding

 Episodic Memories – Events that are personally relevant. As a

result, a person’s motivation to retain these memories will likely
be strong, and recall of the past may affect future behaviour.

 Narrative – A description of a product that is written as a story,

is often an effective way to convey product information.
a) Encoding
the belief that every person should own at least seven pairs of
jeans, one for every day of the week.

 Sensory Memory – Stores the information we receive from our senses. This
storage is temporary; it lasts a couple of seconds at most.
 E.g. food smell from a restaurant
 Short-term Memory (STM) – Stores information for a limited period of time,
and it has limited capacity. It holds the information we are currently processing.
 Chunking – A configuration that is familiar to the person and that he/she can think
about as a unit.
 E.g. Marketers use chunking to help determine how consumers keep prices in STM
when they comparison-shop.
 Long-term Memory (LTM) – Allows us to retain information for long period of
time. A cognitive process of elaborative rehearsal allows information to move
from STM to LTM.
 E.g. Marketers devise catchy slogans or jingles that consumers repeat on their
own.
b) Storage

The relationship between STM and LTM:

 Traditional approach: Multiple-store perspective assumes STM and LTM are
separate systems.
 Recent approach – Activation Models of Memory: Emphasises the
interdependence of the STM and LTM systems.
 Depends on the nature of processing task different levels of processing occur that
activate some aspects of memory rather than others.
 The more effort it takes to process information, the more likely it Is that information will
transfer into LTM.
b) Storage – Associative Network

 Associative Network – Incoming pieces of information get stored in an

associative network, that contains many bits of related information.
 Incoming information gets put into nodes that connect to one another.
When we view separate pieces of information as similar for some reason,
we chunk them together under some more abstract category. Then, we
interpret new, incoming information to be consistent with the structure we
have created.
 Examples:
 Social networks (e.g. Facebook, Snapchat) have revolutionised how people store and
share memories.
 A consumer may have a network of certain product category. Each node represents a
concept related to the category. When the consumer is asked to list various products of
the category, he/she recalls only those brands that show up in the appropriate category.
The task of a new entrant that wants to position itself as a category member is to
provide cues that facilitate its placement in the appropriate category.
b) Storage – Spreading Activation

 Spreading Activation – If it activates a node, it will also activate other linked

nodes. Meaning thus spreads across the network, and we recall concept that we
use to form attitudes toward the brand.
 This allows us to shift back and forth among levels of meaning. The way we store
a piece of information in memory depends on the type of meaning we initially
assign to it. This meaning type, in turn, will determine how and when something
activates the meaning.
 We could store the memory trace in one of more of the following ways:
 Brand-specific: Memory is stored in terms of claims the brand makes
 Ad-specific: Memory is stored in terms of the medium of content of the ad itself
 Brand identification: Memory is stored in terms of the brand name
 Product category: Memory is stored in terms of how the product works or where it
should be used
 Evaluative reactions: Memory is stored as positive or negative emotions
b) Storage – Levels of Knowledge

Schema – Integrates propositions

to develop a cognitive framework

The ability to move up and down

increases processing flexibility

among levels of abstraction
Proposition / Beliefs – Links two
nodes together to form a more

and efficiency
complex meaning

Meaning Concepts - get stored

as individual nodes
b) Storage – Levels of Knowledge

 Script – A type of schema especially relevant to consumer behaviour, i.e. a

sequence of events an individual expects to occur.

 As consumers we learn service scripts that guide our behaviour in commercial

settings. We expect a certain sequence of events, and we may become
uncomfortable if the service departs from our script.

 This explains why service innovation (e.g. self-service cashier) have met with
resistance by some consumers who have trouble adapting to new sequences of
events.
c) Retrieve

 Retrieval – The process whereby we recover information from long-term memory

 Although most of the information that enters LMT does not go away, it may be
difficult or impossible to retrieve unless the appropriate cues are present.
Factors influencing retrieval:
 Situational factors: Recall is enhanced when we pay more attention to the
message in the first place.
 Easier to retrieve information about pioneer brand (the first brand to enter a market)
than follower brands because the first product’s introduction is likely to be distinctive
and there was no competitor divert our attention at the time being.
 Spacing effect: The tendency for us to recall printed material more effectively
when the advertiser repeats the target item periodically, rather than presenting it
repeatedly in a short time period.
 Nature of the ad itself: E.g. special size/dimensions of printed ads
c) Retrieve – What makes people forget?

 Decay – Memories simply fade with the passage of time.

 Interference – As we learn additional information, it displaces the previous
information.
 Retroactive interference – Consumers may forget stimulus-response associations if they
subsequently learn new responses to the same or similar stimuli.
 Proactive interference – Prior learning can interfere with new learning

 Consumers tend to organise attribute information by brand. Additional

attribute information regarding a brand or similar brands may limit the
person’s ability to recall old brand information.
 Recall may also be inhibited if the brand name is composed of frequently used words.
These words are competing associations; as a result, we retain less brand information.
c) Retrieve – How to boost recall?

 State-Dependent Retrieval – We are better able to access information if our

internal state is the same at the time of recall as when we learned the
information.
 Highlighting Effect – When the order in which consumers learn about brands
determine the strength of association between these brands and their
attributes. Consumers more strongly associate common attributes with early-
learned brands and unique attributes with late-learned brands.
 Salience – The prominence or level of activation in memory. Stimuli that stand
out in contrast to environment are more likely to command attention.
 Von Restorff Effect – Almost any technique that increases the novelty of a
stimulus will improve recall.
c) Retrieve – How to
boost recall? (cont’d)
 The viewing context
 For advertisement, the show in which it appears also influence its impact.
 It’s even better when the advertised product actually makes a reference to the
show.
 Pictorial
 We are more likely to recognise information we see in picture form at a later
time.
 Visual aspects of an ad are more likely to grab a consumer’s attention.
 However, although pictorial ads may enhance recall, they do not necessarily
improve comprehension.
 Introducing a surprise effect
 The intensity and type of emotions we experience at the moment. Those with
unipoloar emotions (only triggers positive or negative emotions) would become
polarised over time, i.e. we recall good things as even better (and vice versa).
c) Retrieve – How to measure consumers’
recall?
Recognition Test Free Recall
Show ads to consumers one at a time, and Ask consumers to independently think of what they
ask if they have seen the ads before. have seen without being prompted for this
information.

Recognition scores tend to be more reliable Recall test result may decay over time.
and do not decay over time.

Recognition is more likely to be an Recall tends to be more important in situations in

important factor in a store, where retailers which consumers do not have product data at their
confront consumers with thousands of disposal, so they must rely on memory to generate
product options, and the task simply may this information.
be to recognise a familiar package.
c) Retrieve – The marketing power of
Nostalgia
 Nostalgia – The bittersweet emotion that arises when we view the past with both
sadness and longing.
 Retro Brand – An updated version of a brand from a prior historical period, e.g.
inspire consumers to think back to an era when (at least in their memories) life
was more stable.
 Some interesting statistics…
 We are more likely to favour songs that were popular when we were 23.5 years old
 Our preferences for fashion model peak at age 33
 We tend to like movie stars who were popular when we were 26 or 27 years old
WEEK 4 CONTENTS

1. Behavioural Learning Theories –

CONSUMER Conditioning results in learning
LEARNING AND 2. Cognitive Learning Theory – We learn
MEMORY about products by observing others’
behaviour

3. Memory – Our brains process

information about brands to retain them
in memory