HOW DO WE LEARN?

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior caused by experience.

We can learn when:
● We observe events that affect others
● We don’t try
=> Incidental learning

Several theories to explain the learning process:

● Behavioral theories: focus on simple stimulus–response connections
● Cognitive theories: regard consumers as solvers of complex problems.
=> It’s important for marketers to understand these theories as well, because basic learning
principles are at the heart of many consumer purchase decisions.

Behavioral Learning Theories

Behavioral learning theories assume that learning takes place as the result of responses to
external events:
● Approach the mind as a “black box”
● Emphasize the observable aspects of behavior
The observable aspects consist of:
● The stimuli or events perceived from the outside world
● The responses, or reactions to these stimuli

Two major approaches to learning represent this view:

● Classical conditioning
● Instrumental conditioning
According to this perspective, the feedback we receive as we go through life shapes our
experiences.
For example:
Consumers who receive compliments on a product choice will be more likely to buy
that brand again, whereas those who get food poisoning at a new restaurant are not likely to
patronize that restaurant in the future.

Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning occurs when a stimulus that elicits a response is paired with another
stimulus that initially does not elicit a response on its own.
● Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): naturally capable of causing the response.
● Conditioned stimulus (CS): response formed by repetition of a stimulus over time
● Conditioned response (CR): the learned response (reflex behavior) to a CS
Classical conditioning can have similar effects for more complex reactions
=> Conditioning effects are more likely to occur after the CS and UCS stimuli have been
paired a number of times.

Stimulus Generalization (a halo effect)

Stimulus generalization refers to the tendency of stimuli similar to a CS to evoke similar,
conditioned responses.
For example:
Consumers in one study of shampoo brands tended to rate those with similar packages as
similar in quality and performance as well.

Stimulus Discrimination
Stimulus discrimination occurs when a UCS does not follow a stimulus similar to a CS.
For example:
Manufacturers of well-established brands commonly urge consumers not to buy “cheap
imitations” because the results will not be what they expect.

Marketing Applications of Classical Conditioning Principles

The transfer of meaning from an unconditioned stimulus to a conditioned stimulus explains
why “made-up” brand names, such as Coca-Cola, or Adidas
For example:
Scans of children show how the pleasure and appetite centers of their brains light up when
they view fast-food-company advertising images such as the McDonald’s logo.

=> These associations are crucial to many marketing strategies that rely on the creation and
perpetuation of brand equity.

Marketing Applications of Repetition

Repetitive ad messages resulted in higher recall and interest in learning more about the
advertised product.
Three exposures to a marketing communication:
● The first creates awareness of the product.
● The second demonstrates its relevance to the consumer.
● The third reminds him or her of the product’s benefits.
However, consumers can become so used to hearing or seeing a marketing stimulus that
they no longer pay attention to it.

Some solutions:
● Create variations of the same basic message to alleviate this problem of advertising
wear-out
● Repeating the same ad was primarily effective when competitors also showed ads on
the site.
● Appear on a site where the content related to the advertised product.

Marketing Applications of Conditioned Product Associations

Advertisements often pair a product with a positive stimulus to create a desirable
association.
For example:
Consumers who viewed a slide of pens paired with either pleasant or unpleasant music were
more likely later to select the pen that appeared with the pleasant music.

Marketing Applications of Stimulus Generalization

The process of stimulus generalization often is central to branding and packaging decisions
that try to capitalize on consumers’ positive associations with an existing brand or company
name.
Strategies that marketers base on stimulus generalization include:
● Family branding
● Product line extension
● Licensing
● Look-alike packaging

Consumer confusion: the copycat brand gets too close to the original.
Some examples for the copycat brand:
Companies with a well-established brand image try to encourage stimulus discrimination
when they promote the unique attributes of their brand.
Marketers of distinctive brands work hard to protect their designs and logos.

Instrumental Conditioning

Instrumental conditioning (or operant conditioning) occurs when we learn to perform

behaviors that produce positive outcomes and avoid those that yield negative outcomes.

Instrumental conditioning occurs in one of three ways:

1 When the environment provides positive reinforcement.

2 Negative reinforcement also strengthens responses so that we learn the appropriate

behavior.

3 Punishment occurs when unpleasant events follow a response.

Positive reinforcement occurs after consumers try a new product and like it.

Source: Provided courtesy of Frito-Lay North America, Inc.

It’s important for marketers to determine the most effective reinforcement schedule to use.
Several schedules are possible:

• Fixed-interval reinforcement.
• Variable-interval reinforcement.

• Fixed-ratio reinforcement.

• Variable-ratio reinforcement.

Marketing Applications of Instrumental Conditioning Principles

Principles of instrumental conditioning are at work when a marketer rewards or punishes a

consumer for a purchase decision.

Frequency marketing is a popular technique that rewards regular purchasers with prizes that
get better as they spend more.

Gamification: The New Frontier for Learning Applications

The fast-growing strategy of gamification turns routine actions into experiences as it adds
gaming elements to tasks that might otherwise be boring or routine.

At its most basic, gamification is simply about providing rewards to customers to encourage
them to buy even more.
The FDIC gamified the process oflearning about financial responsibility.

Source: FDIC.

Many domains of human activity (and business) share the common need to motivate and
reward people to achieve ascending levels of mastery. These include:

• Store and brand loyalty.

• Social marketing.

• Employee performance.

Cognitive Learning Theory

Cognitive learning theory approaches stress the importance of internal mental processes.

Observational Learning
People store these observations in memory as they accumulate knowledge and then they
use this information at a later point to guide their own behavior.

Modeling is the process of imitating the behavior of others, which is a powerful form of
learning, and people’s tendencies to imitate others’ behaviors can have negative effects.

Of particular concern is the potential of television shows and movies to teach violence to
children.
Figure 4.2 shows that for observational learning in the form of modeling to occur, the
marketer must meet four conditions.

Is Learning Conscious or Not?

There is some evidence to support the existence of nonconscious procedural knowledge.

People apparently do process at least some information in an automatic, passive way, a
condition that researchers call “mindlessness”.

Nonetheless, many modern theorists regard some instances of automatic conditioning as

cognitive processes, especially when people form expectations about the linkages between
stimuli and responses.

Marketing Applications of Cognitive Learning Principles

Marketers don’t necessarily have to directly reward or punish consumers when they make a
purchase.
In general, the degree to which a person emulates someone else depends on that model’s
level of social attractiveness.

How Do We Learn to Be Consumers?

Consumer socialization is 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
Parents influence consumer socialization both directly and indirectly.

Parents also determine the degree to which their children come into contact with other
information sources.

Adults also serve as significant models for observational learning.

Figure 4.3 summarizes the sequence of stages as kids turn into consumers.

The process of consumer socialization begins with infants; within the first two years, children
request products they want. By about age five, most kids make purchases with the help of
parents and grandparents, and by age eight most buy things on their own.

Parents exhibit different styles when they socialize their children.

Television and the Internet: Electronic Babysitters.

Advertising starts to influence us at an early age.

Cognitive Development
Marketers segment kids in terms of their stage of cognitive development, or their ability to
comprehend concepts of increasing complexity.

Many developmental specialists no longer believe that children necessarily pass through
these fixed stages at the same time.

Howerver, many developmental specialists no longer believe that children necessarily pass
through these fixed stages at the same time. An alternative view proposes that they differ in
information-processing capability or the ability to store and retrieve information from
memory.

Three developmental stages:

1 Limited
2 Cued
3 Strategic

This sequence of development underscores the notion that children do not think in the same
way adults do, and we can’t expect them to use information the same way either.

Research underscores the idea that children’s understanding of brand names evolves as
they age. Kids learn to relate to brand names at an early age; they recognize brand names
in stores, develop preferences for some brands over others, and request branded items by
name.

Conceptual brand meanings, which specify the nonobservable abstract features of the
product, enter into the picture in middle childhood (about age eight); children incorporate
them into their thinking and judgments a few years later.

Message Comprehension

Because children differ in their abilities to process product-related information, advertisers’

direct appeals to them raise many serious ethical issues.

Figure 4.4 shows one attempt to assess whether kids can tell that a commercial is trying to
persuade them.

MEMORY
Memory is a process of acquiring information and storing it over time so that it will be
available when we need it.

How Our Brains Encode Information

The way we encode, or mentally program, information helps to determine how our brains will store
this information.

Episodic memories relate to events that are personally relevant.

A narrative, or a description of a product that is written as a story, is often an effective way to convey
product information.

Research supports the idea that we are more likely to positively evaluate and purchase brands when
they connect with us like this.

Researchers describe three distinct memory systems:

Sensory memory stores the information we receive from our senses. This storage is temporary; it
lasts a couple of seconds at most.

Short-term memory (STM) also stores information for a limited period of time, and it has limited
capacity. Our memories can store verbal input acoustically (in terms of how it sounds) or semantically
(in terms of what it means).

Long-term memory (LTM) is the system that allows us to retain information for a long period of time.

How Our Memories Store Information

Associative Networks

We each have organized systems of concepts that relate to brands, manufacturers, and stores stored
in our memories; the contents, of course, depend on our own unique experiences.
Spreading Activation

A marketing message may activate our memory of a brand directly (for example, when it shows us a
picture of the package), or it may do so indirectly when it links to something else that’s related to the
brand in our knowledge structure.

Levels of Knowledge

Within a knowledge structure, we code elements at different levels of abstraction and complexity.

How We Retrieve Memories When We Decide What to Buy It

Retrieval is the process whereby we recover information from long-term memory.

Situational factors also influence retrieval; these relate to the environment in which we encounter the
message.

The spacing effect describes 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.
What makes us forget?
Early memory theorists assumed that memories simply fade with the passage of time.
Forgetting also occurs as a result of interference; as we learn additional information, it
displaces the previous information.
State-Dependent Retrieval
The state-dependent retrieval illustrates that 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.
It shows that marketers can enhance recall by re-creating the cues present when they first
presented the information.
Familiarity and Recall
As a general rule, when we are already familiar with an item we're more likely to recall
messages about it.
But some evidence indicates that extreme familiarity can result in inferior learning and recall.
Salience and Recall
The salience of a brand refers to its prominence or level of activation in memory.
Stimuli that stand out in contrast to their environments are more likely to command attention,
which increases the likelihood that we will recall them.
This explains why unusual advertising or distinctive packaging tends to facilitate brand
recall.
The Viewing Context
Nielsen reports that viewers who enjoy a program are more likely to respond positively to
commercials and want to buy the advertised product.
Viewers are almost one-third more likely to remember brands whose products were placed in
shows they enjoy.
Pictorial Versus Verbal Cues
Certainly, visual aspects of an ad are more likely to grab a consumer’s attention.
In fact, eye-movement studies indicate that about 90 percent of viewers look at the dominant
picture in an ad before they bother to view the copy.
Ex: Mini cooper

How we measure consumers’s recall of marketing messages

Recognition versus Recall
Two basic measures of good advertising are recognition and recall.
In a typical recognition test, researchers show ads to subjects one at a time and ask if they
have seen them before.
In contrast, free recall tests ask consumers to independently think of what they have seen
without being prompted first
Problems with Memory Measures
Respondents may be contaminated by response biases. In this case, people tend to give yes
responses to questions regardless of the question
In addition, experimental subjects often are eager to be “good subjects”. They try to figure
out what the experimenter is looking for and give the response they think they are supposed
to give.
Memory Lapses
Typical problems include:
● Omitting
● Averaging
● Telescoping
Bittersweet memories: The Marketing Power of Nostalgia
Nostalgia describes the bittersweet emotion that arises when we view the past with
both sadness and longing
When marketers play on nostalgia, they want us to attach our fond memories to new
products.
One way to do this is to introduce retro brands.