Heuristics, Memory and Nostalgia

Research suggests that customers go through a five-stage decision-making process in any purchase. This is summarised in the diagram below:



"For example, a student buying a favourite hamburger would recognise the need (hunger) and go right to the purchase decision, skipping information search and evaluation. However, the model is very useful when it comes to understanding any purchase that requires some thought and deliberation".

A customer can obtain information from several sources:
• Personal sources: family, friends, neighbours etc
• Commercial sources: advertising; salespeople; retailers; dealers; packaging; point-of-sale displays
• Public sources: newspapers, radio, television, consumer organisations; specialist magazines
• Experiential sources: handling, examining, using the product

"An important determinant of the extent of evaluation is whether the customer feels “involved” in the product. By involvement, we mean the degree of perceived relevance and personal importance that accompanies the choice.
Where a purchase is “highly involving”, the customer is likely to carry out extensive evaluation.
High-involvement purchases include those involving high expenditure or personal risk – for example buying a house, a car or making investments.
Low involvement purchases (e.g. buying a soft drink, choosing some breakfast cereals in the supermarket) have very simple evaluation processes".

An example from our lecture:



We were talking about Heuristic as well.
According to Encyclopedia: "
Heuristic (hyu-ˈris-tik) is an adjective for methods that help in problem solving in turn leading to learning and discovery. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information".

For example, people may tend to perceive more expensive beers as tasting better than inexpensive ones (providing the two beers are of similar initial quality or lack of quality and of similar style). This finding holds true even when prices and brands are switched; putting the high price on the normally relatively inexpensive brand is enough to lead subjects to perceive it as tasting better than the beer that is normally more expensive.

Fast and frugal heuristics meet the criteria set forth in Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2004. Fast and frugal heuristics are rules of thumb for decision making that are:
1. ecologically rational (that is, they exploit structures of information in the environment)
2. founded in evolved psychological capacities such as memory and the perceptual system
3. fast, frugal, and simple enough to operate effectively when time, knowledge, and computational might are limited
4. precise enough to be modeled computationally
5. powerful enough to model both good and poor reasoning.




“Every time an advertisement or commercial appears, the objective is to have the reader or viewer learn something …. and remember what he learned “ (Britt 1955)

In psychology, memory is an organism's mental ability to store, retain and recall information. A basic and generally accepted classification of memory is based on the duration of memory retention, and identifies three distinct types of memory: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory. Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200 - 500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. Short-term memory allows one to recall something from several seconds to as long as a minute without rehearsal. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration".

The multi-store model (also known as Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model) was first recognised in 1968 by Atkinson and Shiffrin.



We did a very interesting experiment during Friday's lecture. We had to remember as many products from the shopping list as it was possible and match each item with a specific thing, for example matches and shoe. In other words, we had to use our imagination:) It was much easier to remember this list than a normal one. It explains how do people react for conditioned and unconditioned stimulus.

Conditioned stimulus are often being used in marketing. After watching some adverts, we easily relate for example Lipton tea with a family or Nike with sport and many achievements.

Later, we were talking about nostalgia.
The term nostalgia describes "a longing for the past, often in idealized form. The word is made up of two Greek roots (νόστος nostos "returning home", and άλγος algos "pain"), to refer to "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native home, and fears never to see it again". It was described as a medical condition, a form of melancholy, in the Early Modern period, and came to be an important topic in Romanticism".



Pepsi Cola Around The Globe - one of our most popular nostalgia card sets.

Like Ruth said: "Advertisers try to use nostalgic themes such that consumers LINK the happiness/good feelings they had at that time to the product that they are trying to sell".

And these are mine nostalgic memories... :)



Here are some articles which I have used in my post:
http://fastandfrugal.com
http://psychology.about.com/od/cindex/g/condstim.htm
http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/buying_decision_process.asp