Heuristics and Print Advertising - Essay Example

Heuristics and Print Advertising Marketing may be defined as - The process by which products and services are introduced to the marketplace (Park & Lessig 1981). Furthermore, it highlights every characteristic of the firm and product (Tversky 1972). As a result, research in marketing has to have an over all approach so that the marketers can understand the entire trend and make the consumers realize that this is the right choice (Nelson 1974). The essential concept: Traditional economic approaches that assume that people make decisions by trading off all features of all alternatives to maximize utility are wrong. Instead, people use simplifying heuristics to get through complex decision making. For example, people naturally classify alternatives into categories and then eliminate broad sets of alternatives (Dzyabura & Hauser 2010). They consider alternatives in succession and take the first one that meets their needs (a process of what Nobelist Herbert Simon called "satisficing" strategies). People find reference points to help simplify decision making (Midgley 1977). Store brands appear to be good buys because they sit on a shelf next to national brands at much lower prices (Hauser 2011). And shoppers tend to navigate a store a certain way. When faced with unfamiliar alternatives, they gravitate to the familiar as a safer starting point. Imagine: You're sick to your stomach in a foreign country. You go to a local pharmacy and what do you find: row after row of unfamiliar brands in unfamiliar packages. You panic. But if you spot one brand that you do recognize, you're likely to buy it — even though it's a product you've rarely used before. Familiarity relaxes the risk/fear response and leads to simplified choice. Behavioral economics is shining a light on the power of simplicity. Books such as Predictably Irrational — Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (2009) and How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer (2009) have topped best-seller lists. And, although simplifying heuristics might seem irrational, they may be globally optimal when we consider that people successfully make thousands of decisions in an average day. In fact, our brains would explode if we were to consider becoming calculative utility-maximizers with respect to each of these choices. An anthropologist might explore the need for Heuristics by observing the ritualized ways in which a person's day unfolds. And it's true: We all have recurring patterns for how we get going in the morning, what happens when we first arrive at work, and what happens once we return home at the end of a day (Hauser 2011). Yet each of our personal patterns is quite different from those of anyone else. In other words, we have a multitude of choices, but we each fall into our own pattern and choose our own simplified, recurring way of navigating a day. And the habits can be as basic as watching television. In a given week, on average, viewers watch only 10 percent of the channels available to them. How do they get to those selections? By ritual. For example, a viewer who always start on the same channel and then click on to the onscreen guide (Liberali eatl 2011). It's a simplifying pattern that starts off my evening entertainment, and we all have simplifying patterns for just about everything we do. For marketers, brand-loyalty patterns traditionally have been interpreted as manifestations of attachment to brands. Through our "people-crave-simplification" lens, however, we see with another explanation (Hauser etal 2011). Brands function as simplifying heuristics that let us get through shopping trips in a fraction of the time that full consideration would demand. Our familiarity with certain brands and accumulated use experience becomes an efficient shortcut to what otherwise would be a lengthy decision-making process (Selove & Hauser 2011). To understand whether loyalty is a function of love for the brand or a simplifying heuristic, keep a diary of all the brands you use during a day. If the consumer reached 77 brands by 2 PM and then he realized that he really cared about only 5 of them (even though I exhibit purchase loyalty to more than that). If loyalty is based more on heuristics than deep-seated attachment it could explain why Catalina Marketing's analysis of tens of millions of shoppers across two years of data disclosed that about one-half of "loyal" buyers to a particular brand are not loyal one year later (Selove & Hauser 2011).. It might also explain why only a small percentage of customers of most brands engage with those products or in social media places. The Coca-Cola Company's 3.5 million Facebook fans, for instance, are but a small percent of those on Facebook who drink Coke products (Ashcraft 2006). As the long tail of using heuristics continues to get even longer (as the number of choices increases for media, for products, for places to shop, etc.), the desire for simplification will become more acute (Goel etal 2004). For marketers, that's an opportunity to give people what they want — to invent new ways of simplifying not just their lives but their purchase choices (Corneille, Monin &Pleyers 2004). "Simplification" in marketing begins with rethinking the heuristics experience (McCammon 2004). "Shop-ability" is one way to describe making it easy and quick for shoppers to find what they need and to make choices. Shopping expert Herb Sorensen — the inventor of the PathTracker monitor of shopping carts — calculates that 80 percent of time that shoppers spend in stores is wasted on non-productive navigation rather than on their main purpose of buying specific items. In his thought-provoking new book, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing (2009), Sorensen (2009) reveals that a typical supermarket contains about 40,000 SKUs. But, over the course of a year, a shopper buys only 400 of those offerings. I n fact, he adds that most shopping trips to large stores are small trips, so the store layout is particularly nonsimplifying (Cytryn 2001). He believes that a big part of the success of Stew Leonard's (self-proclaimed "World's Largest Dairy Store" and a powerful force in the New York/Connecticut grocery business) is that it takes the decision making out of how shoppers go through the store by simplifying store navigation. (For any readers who have not been there, the aisles are set up as a winding, unbroken path through the store so shoppers need to start in a particular place and go through the whole store.) Sorensen (2009) offers a number of interesting ideas. He suggests that retailers change their store layout to minimize navigation time. Presumably, that means challenging basic "laws" of merchandising like the rule, "put the milk in the back of the store to encourage people to walk through the whole store." He also suggests that manufacturers label their best-sellers as a guide to shoppers to help the "head" stand out from the "long-tail." It's bold thinking and a fertile ground for further reconsideration of old habits that have gone unchallenged for too long (Albarracin & Wyer 2000). Heuristics should create more thematic retail activation zones so shoppers will more readily see solutions and be able to understand what a new item is all about even if they hadn't previously been aware of It (Quellette & Wood 1998). QR ("quick read") codes — a kind of two-dimensional bar code that send mobile browser to a website for more information or special offers — already have regular (and enthusiastic) users in Japan. Their success in other markets in simplifying the shopping process is a promise of continued adaptation in other global markets (Ding etal 2011). Augmented reality (AR) is a way of superimposing digitally accessed information on real objects (Dieckmann, Dippold & Dietrich 2009). Football fans will recognize AR as the electronic first-down markers visible to viewers at home but not to fans in the stands. With AR retail displays, a pair of shopping glasses — normal looking in every other way — will provide consumers with informative graphics in their field of view and audio feeds will link with the visual sight lines. It's technology that can simplify the choice process by bringing information a shopper desires right to the point of purchase (Hauser, Tellis & Griffin 2006). Advertising that occurs close to a purchase event (referred to as the concept of "recency") has been shown to be more effective than advertising exposure that occurs more distant in time from the purchase(Hauser etal 2010). This suggests that advertising has impact by reminding — or even priming someone — to buy (in particular, to buy a specific brand) (Montoya-Weiss, & Calantone 1994). The theory of recency, in fact, would seem to have currency because people are not examining all alternatives but using simplifying decision heuristics to get out of the store faster (Payne, Bettman & Johnson 1992). In that case, messages delivered right at point of purchase could have great impact as shopper marketing outdoes recency by offering immediacy (Payne, Bettman & Johnson 1993). It's a theory supported by research: For many grocery products, 50 percent (or more) of brand-level purchase decisions are still open for consideration as shoppers navigate a store (POPAI, 1995). The consequences for marketers could be enormous: It would naturally call for budgetary increases in shopper marketing (Tucker & Zhang 2010). And, as applications such as QR codes and AR make the exchange between consumer and retailer ever more shopper specific, the spending realignment would trickle down differently to product categories, as some products are more influenced by in-store factors than others (Tucker & Zhang 2011). A final thought about marketing heuristics: The brand image is a source of immediate product knowledge. Certain brands are well known for overarching benefits (e.g., Healthy Choice) and new line extensions of such brands can generate a spontaneous in-store trial. Give a shopper a brand name combined with a functional description of the product; categorization and analogical associations can provide a consumer with enough insight to make a purchase decision. And, for products that find their consumer connections through a "satisficing" strategy, the marketing effort will become increasingly reliant on this in-store component. In an increasingly complex world, standing for " heuristics " might be the best differentiating brand benefit of all. Witness Geico's "so-easy-a-caveman-could-do-it" tagline. It's a strategy that auto-rental companies have employed for years, each one trying to out simplify the other. More marketers need to turn their innovation energies toward inventive ways of simplifying people's lives rather than just adding more products to the line — additions that actually are subtractions in that they often make decision making even harder (Tooby & Cosmides 1992). Simon’s (1991) study on marketing strategies of cognitive sounds of the human mind encouraged further research on heuristics ad biases which are not affected by rationality. Work on heuristics grew due to Simon’s work a lot of researchers followed his foot steps (Sarasvathy & Simon 2000). Whilst bounded rationality has been interpreted by a number of theorists as a kind of predictive rationality, and different literature on heuristics has made it an extremely interesting topic. It helps the consumers to make their decisions, in simpler words it helps in the comparison process (Eagly & Chaiken 1995). Heuristics research highlights the fact that persuasion and change in the belief system is related to how much time the consumer takes to think or ponder over the message. The main jest of it is that the message receiver’s cognation plays and more important role then the meaning or worth of the message. Thus the factors of the message have to be manipulated according to the target population cognation pattern. Visual metaphors may be an important part of the message which is to be put forth, as it will help in greater cognitive elaboration, as well as assist in subsequent persuasion (Breckler & Wiggins 1992). As consumers who are interested in advertisements which consist of visual metaphors might enthusiastically think about and keenly react to the persuasive argument portrayed in it, this might lead to amore effective change in the consumers decision making . Pictures may be considered as extremely important heuristic cues as they help in heuristic approach to processing (Petty et al., 1991), as hey help in delivering arguments which carries eth true meaning of the message and can lead to central and systematic forms of processing. Therefore, which method of processing the consumers will use does not depend on the picture or image but the contents or message which the picture or images passes on to the view then only can the heuristics be considered as being effective persuasive messages. Conclusion Thus, marketing may be very dynamic felid, but always passing on the correct message to the consumers has always been a challenge. For this the use of heuristics. Decision making is a vital part of marketing the consumer can only be sure of the product if he gets the corrects message. In order forth Heuristics the correct message. 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