ARE CONSUMERS TRULY “OVERLOADED” WITH MARKETING INFORMATION – OR NOT?
Introduction
Providing information clearly, concisely and in a consumer-friendly way -- whether through fliers, packaging, advertising, the Web and/or personal service -- can be an important tool for supermarkets and brands. Information overload is a problem that keeps on growing -- as do the number of technological solutions. We all know and experience the problem firsthand on a daily basis. There's just too much data coming at us from all directions - journal articles, newspapers, e-mail, web pages, Internet discussion groups, intranet information, notes databases, phone mail, and more.
As businesses continue their intense competition for new customers and strive to retain the ones they have with increasingly frequent promotional campaigns, information overload has become a common ailment among your customers. Consider that the average consumer has to wade through a daily flood of mail and telephone solicitations; television, radio and print advertising; blimps, billboards and other media blitzes. While consumers are looking for value as never before, they are becoming increasingly frustrated by the torrential flood of information they must digest, and understand. The result is that communications have less and less impact. And the return-on-investment for marketing efforts is squeezed thinner and thinner.
The taking in or information of the consumer and how this affects consumer behavior is affected to a large extent by the process of perception. This, in relation to information overloading, will be discussed in this paper.
Body
An attribute of desirable markets include adequate and reliable market information which is provided to market participants, both producers and consumers (1999). However, researchers report that consumers are confused by an abundance of less-than useful information about virtually every product’s specific benefits, correct dosages, uses, contents, and many more. This though has not stopped consumers from sampling and even buying products.
The collection and dissemination of marketing information involves not merely the passive receipt or acceptance of information offered by sellers but active efforts to collect data from other sources, such as governmental institutions and trade associations. Moreover, the collection of information would be of little value unless it is interpreted and disseminated with skill and intelligence. No small part of business success is attributed to the skill with which specialized marketing research departments and companies collect, analyze, and distribute factual information that serves as the basis for marketing decisions. Also, some marketing institutions such as brokers and resident buyers owe their existence, in large part, to their skill in obtaining, analyzing, and distributing information concerning sources of supply, prices and price trends, and other market conditions (1999).
Qualitative studies suggest that many consumers who go into a store specifically to purchase a supplement come out without buying anything. They're so confused that they become paralyzed. This kind of situation not only happens with buying supplements. This happens in all other things. Due to vast information being fed to consumers, unwanted and wanted, consumers become confused of what to buy.
Communications glut in the marketplace is more than just an inconvenience, it's also the reason the reader never finds the needle in the haystack. Customers may have difficulty understanding essential information or may entirely miss what the marketing department has worked so hard to develop and disseminate because of too much useless information. The end result is a waste of time and money (Johnson, 1997), on both the parts of the consumers and marketers.
The solution to this is to provide only the useful information that could help the consumers and not confuse them instead. Home Depot is an expert in its category on providing useful information to customers in the form of signage, books, magazines, workshops, fliers and in-store help. All of these assist the shopper through the decision process (1999). An understanding of how consumer perceptions affect consumer buyer and behavior is also important.
A major goal for providing marketing information is to have an enduring emotional impact on an audience by facilitating their creation of personally relevant understandings of an advertisement. Perceived utility is the key to a marketing program's impact - does it contain information that people can understand and use? Marketers should give structure, order and access to marketing information through the use of graphic devices and text formats that help users navigate and understand complex data. Cognitive learning theories are also tapped to create appropriate hierarchies for complex information (1997). This is achieved through a process of cocreation in which consumers integrate marketing information content with their own attitudes, beliefs, and values to produce the meaning of an advertisement or commercial (2006).
Several researchers in the area of consumer behavior have studied how people organize knowledge in a categorical manner in memory. However, early work in psychology on categorization and time also asserted that there seemed to be basic temporal categories, and that these are part of larger networks of on-going cognitive processes (2001).
The creation of a full sensory and emotional experience for the customer can open marketing opportunities in the future, but there has been little research work carried out in recent years on the potential of haptic perception as a marketing tool (Solomon et al, 2002). The buying decision for materials is a complex process as it represents a mixture of technical, economic, and emotional factors that determine the motivations and actions of the consumers (2006).
There is a lack of scientifically based information concerning the sense of touch, either as a direct experience with a product or regarding the contact with our skin, but we know that touch is a very important factor in many products and services (Hoyer and Maclnnis, 2004). The role of touch and its implications on customer behavior (1992) or the importance of touching products during the buying decision process and the lack of it in non-touch-media like e-commerce and mail order (2003) have been researched.
The reconstructive view of memory holds that the memory for the same event is different each time it is recalled and that the person doing the recalling is unaware of these changes. We present an experimental paradigm that assesses advertising's influence on consumers' own memory of their beliefs. It has been demonstrated that advertising can unconsciously alter consumers' beliefs as reflected by a change in how consumers recall their earlier reporting of these beliefs following an advertising exposure.
That is, advertising that causes consumers to remember differently earlier (preadvertising exposure) reported beliefs and in which the change is in the direction of the advertisement's message is an advertisement that contains information the consumer has unconsciously adopted as their own and therefore is likely to be personally relevant and to have an enduring impact on their emotions (2006)
Consumers and marketers generally distinguish between two types of information used to make decisions: internal and external. Internal information is that which the consumer has gained through experience; external information is information they may have encountered that attempts to influence their beliefs. When making their decisions, consumers prefer to believe they are relying on their own internally generated information because "people rarely derogate themselves as sources of information" (2006).
Many researchers have sought ways to measure a marketing information tool such as advertisements integration into consumers' internal belief systems. For example, consumers may be asked to rate their involvement in the advertisement, their emotional reaction to the advertisement, or the personal relevance of the advertisement. Such measures rely on questions about the advertising itself but often fail to reveal the true impact of the advertisement on consumer cognition. These measures may be biased by other information such as brand "liking," which may result in a "halo effect" that distorts how a person responds to the copy test questions. More broadly, such measures depend on the consumer's ability to self-report; and as mentioned in the initial paragraph, consumers may not be able to do that accurately. This may be in part due to cultural factors, where consumers tend to discount the influence of advertising (2006), and in part due to cognitive factors, in that they might not have the ability to accurately access that information (2004).
Due to the increased phenomenon of stimulus satiation, it is more important than ever to ascertain how the properties of a material are perceived with our senses. If marketing strategies place more emphasis on increasing consumers' perceptions of a product, this could lead to more sustainable impressions and reactions in the purchasing process. In the marketing aspect, perception was considered the cutaneous stimulation and the kinaesthetic stimulation that convey significant information about objects and events (1998).
Conclusion
Consumer behavior is affected by marketing information that consumers themselves get. Marketing information is helpful in that it provides the consumers the information they need about the product or service before buying it. However, too much of a good thing is bad. Too much information chokes the consumer instead of helping them. The value of perception is also important in consumer behavior. Decisions are affected by consumer’s perceptions on certain products and services. This affects decisions more than the other marketing information that they get. As mentioned, if marketing strategies place more emphasis on increasing consumers' perceptions of a product, this could lead to more sustainable impressions and reactions in the purchasing process. This is more helpful than overloading the consumer with too much useless information.
0 comments:
Post a Comment