Consumer Psychology
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There are other theories of perception apart from Gibson’s and the idea that there is direct perception of higher order invariants of complex arrays in the environment, is still controversial. However it will provide you with a suitable framework to understand how information from the outside world is processed as humans navigate around increasingly complex consumptionscapes 11 whether they are in massive malls or detailed online microcosms of browsing and purchase viewed on a smartphone screen which you hold in your palm.
Memory
Turning now to memory we need some theory of what it is, largely because it provides input to all human behaviour that is not inherited or automatic and includes the repertoire of consumer-related behaviour we have. There are life-span development issues both with becoming more skilled as we learn and hopefully wiser with experience and also our memory changes with age although in many of us our desire to learn new things and pursue different activities is still there.
Probably the most familiar way of looking at memory is to use a time base. After all remembering and forgetting are complementary terms and over time you forget things. You are in a rush to go out and you are absent minded and put your keys on the table while you get your coat. You’re at the door and ‘where are my keys?’ Events that happen when you have divided attention between focussing on what you are doing and what you are thinking, can often end like that. You recognise the keys and recall putting them there if you are lucky enough to find them quickly but if not you’ll spend an irritating few minutes exploring the usual suspects like table tops, sideboards, pocket, handbag etc. So we have a short-term memory and a long-term memory . Short-term memory can last for up to 30 seconds and items can be kept in longer by repeating them, a process known as rehearsal. Long-term memory does not have this limitation.
There are other ways of producing an anatomy of memory. Mantonakis, Whittlesea, and Yoon (2008) provide three dichotomies of memory which are useful. One is episodic/semantic where an episode might be your first day at university , or a bungee jump on holiday, or when and where and the events that happened when your first child was born. They don’t have to be particularly memorable in terms of content but these ones demonstrate how emotion plus episodic memory can often be clearly recalled. Semantic memory is what you know: Facts, meanings, mental representations of images, knowing how to use a smartphone are all examples of this kind of memory.
The second dichotomy is procedural/declarative . Procedural consists of automatic well-learnt skills like riding a bike or playing a musical instrument. For example I gave up cycling as a leisure pursuit over 20 years ago. A couple of years ago I was given an electric bike which is useful for getting up hills, steep inclines being one of the reasons I stopped cycling in middle age. There was no problem getting on and automatically achieving balance although there were some buttons to press that took at least 10 minutes to master. If you learnt the violin as a child and took it up again some years later you would know automatically just where your fingers should go and probably still be able to do scales. These are stored away in what is known as long-term memory. The declarative memory part of this dichotomy is not automatic and you need to actively think to retrieve. Remembering facts and routes to get from home to work are declarative. You can help your declarative memory with prosthetic devices like an internet browser and as I write this I am adding sources and exploring byways with the help of Firefox, Google and search engines Business Source Complete (BSC) and PsycINFO covering both the business and psychology academic literature.
The third one will be looked at in detail when we examine what are known as dual process models in consumer psychology (Chapter 5) and a process known as priming in Chapter 4. It’s the contrast between explicit and implicit processing of information. The former is assumed to operate when the person is consciously aware of trying to remember but the latter one is extremely important for consumer psychologists as you were not consciously aware of when you were processing it but using particular techniques you show evidence that you must have seen and processed that stimulus before.
The edifice called memory can be carved up in three ways and the dichotomy in each cut is fortunate rather than natural. One particular memory task might involve several procedures especially if I am glued to my smartphone trying to navigate down a busy street remembering where the bus stop for the number 18 is and whether I have brought the present for John and why we have been invited anyway.
Attention
I argued earlier when looking at perception that one of the problems of twenty-first century life is the sheer complexity of information assaulting the senses. The ecology of consumption is no stranger to information overload as the design of both malls and websites for online purchase are designed to grab your attention on all channels; visual and auditory for both and the added attraction of smells, touch, social presence, for the mall with the dubious proprioceptive 12 benefits of being shaken and stirred on fun rides for both kids and adults . For the mall ecology often small groups of friends or family provide the proximal or immediate input and act as a buffer against the distal 13 salespersons, and other intrusive stimuli together with providing a guide to ‘where to go now’. The ecology of consumption online is different and new. With the dominance of the smartphone the environment for online consumption can have its own cycle of consumption (see “The Cycle of Consumption” in Chapter 1) in sites like rail carriages, buses, planes or ‘at meetings’. Attention can be enhanced by avoiding social eye contact with others and using earpieces or headsets.
That’s one way of attending to the consumption task at hand. However there are inbuilt attention mechanisms that are part of the design features of human information processing and the purpose of this section is to provide a description of them so you understand the role of attention in consumption and how it works. The problem of information overload has two meanings. One is cultural and refers to the jobs we have to do using the internet for example where there is simply too much information available and the problem is not finding an answer to a question but to judge which of several answers is the best one. Multi-tasking i.e. switching attention between several jobs and deciding ‘on the fly’ which one(s) to prioritise has for many people replaced the mind-numbing repetition of routines that characterised labour in the twentieth century, although these jobs still exist in today’s gig economy . 14 But the meaning used here is the one where the channels of information available to us are designed to provide too much information and an attention mechanism that prioritises, chooses and selects is necessary. This selective attention can operate either by using schemata or by prioritising certain features of the information flowing in earlier on in the process at the level of the senses. These are sometimes known as top-down processing where the ‘top’ refers to the mind and instructions trickle down from there, and bottom-up processing where the information available to the mind is controlled lower down in the sequence nearer to the stimulus level. Other terms that can be used are goal -oriented where the relevance is determined at the ‘top’ and the basis or criteria for allowing information to be processed further is based on finding task-relevant information as contrasted with stimulus-driven. Goal -oriented can correspond to ‘paying attention’ which can be a matter of the teacher telling the student at school or one’s own private effort to pay attention to for example what another person is saying at a cocktail party. 15
Some of the stimulus properties that can potentially prioritise during bottom-up processing i.e. allow that stimulus to go to the front of the queue are novelty, ecological or survival importance, and familiarity. So a brand that is different, the smell of fire when asleep or your own name said aloud should all get through the gate and be attended to.
From Colour to Metaphor
It’s unlikely you will be able to see a link between these two words at the moment so it’s my job to convince you there is. If you are interested in deep meanings behind everyday things then you might want to read on. I’m assumi
ng you are interested in deep meanings behind what people say whether they be philosophers or lovers or even both. But do brands speak to you? Do you wonder what’s really being said in that ad? Then this might just be for you.
Let’s start with colour. The existence of ‘colour psychology ’ would both seem to be assured if a quick scan of the internet is anything to go by. There is plenty of material claiming to identify colours that will enhance your sales together with analyses of the hidden meanings behind colours. However it is more difficult to find an answer in the conventional academic journals and I guess if there was a simple answer that guaranteed instant improvement, I would not be writing this. Complexity rears its ugly head and dashes all hopes of a quick buck. The first problem is to define what colour is in the context of material objects. Young (2006) argued that colour is mutually constituted by things and persons which fit nicely with Gibson’s ecologically driven blend of perception and action. For example I have a machine in our garden to clean concrete slabs with water under high pressure and we bought another version recently to steam clean floors, showers, and stoves in the house. Both are made by the same firm and come in a livery of black with yellow features. Sometimes yellow is used as the main colour with features picked out in black and there is the occasional foray into grey. They are modular in design with a reservoir of water and various fitments and extensions. It suits me. It activates an appreciation of aesthetic functionality, and the job (dirt disappearing, cleanliness restored, value added) is one which has a moral quality. Even the name has a certain Scandinavian/Germanic resonance and I perceive the black and yellow as perfect colours for me in my ecological niche . But I would never wear a woolly jumper with black and yellow stripes as I don’t want to look like a wasp or even run that risk.
In order to make sense of colour we need to analyse it. There are various systems for doing this but they all appear to have three elements. The first is the hue and we can identify this as the colour i.e. what we call it. ‘That’s red’; ‘It’s blue like the sky’; ‘Well, a sort of greenish hue’. The second is saturation that qualifies or describes a particular hue and ranges from a greyish version of the hue to a vivid hue. ‘That’s a sludge sort of green’; ‘Wow that’s sparkling pink, clean’. Finally brightness is how light or dark it seems and is related to how much whiteness or darkness is there. Watch the sky change before the sun rises on a cloudless day; it can take about an hour in spring at the latitude where I live.
That’s my gloss on these three aspects of colour. The names of colours are not fixed and immutable and differ from language to language. However we may get to a partial answer to the question of which colours are memorable and which are not by assuming a colour space in three dimensions identified as hue, saturation and brightness and each colour can be identified as a location in that space. 16 Are some locations in the colour space easier to describe to other people than other colours in the colour space i.e. are they more codable? Are these colours more easily remembered? If there are colours like that are they the same in different languages? Rosch Heider (1972) 17 in an early paper demonstrated that there were salient areas of the colour space which are the most codable and most easily remembered and that this held across different languages as well. The astute marketer might think that all that needs to be done is to market these colours as paints and you’ll have a distinct advantage over your competitors because surely every potential consumer across the world will recall or recognise it easiest? Unfortunately not and the main reason why claims in this area need to be treated with scepticism is that both the symbolism and the perceptual advantage of some colours is inextricably linked with the symbolism of the thing that is coloured or will be coloured. Swatches of cloth or chips of colour on a display do not describe the experience of the dress that is worn or wall that is painted. That’s why a colour when chosen from a book might disappoint on a wall and that’s why very small sample tubs of paint are sold to ‘try it out’ when painting a large surface in that space so full of symbolism ; the home .
Although colour is an experience based on the sensory modality of vision, the senses are interlinked in some individuals through the phenomenon of synaesthesia . This is an experience in one or more sensory modalities (known as the concurrent) when another modality is stimulated (called the inducer) and it has been estimated that 4% of the population have this condition (Rogowska, 2011, p. 213). For example, when hearing a sound a synaesthete might also experience a colour. 18 Although each individual synaesthete is different from another in terms of the experience and what triggers it, the experience is relatively constant within the individual across the lifespan (Rogowska, op. cit., p. 213).
Synaesthetic Description
Although synaesthesia is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, the question needs to be put: Does the rest of the population show similar tendencies on a different level or is synaesthesia a singular oddity? Spector and Maurer (2009) argued that synesthesia was an exaggeration of processes that we all possess (op. cit., p. 178) and claimed that in infancy cross-modal connections are prevalent within the brain so that activation of an area dealing with the sensory modality of vision is linked to the area dealing with sound for example. 19 There is also evidence that the associations between sensory modalities that are perceived by synaesthetes are similar to the choices made when non-synaesthetes and toddlers aged 2.5–3 years are faced with a choice between two sounds (one pitched high and the other low) for light coloured and dark coloured bouncing balls. They chose the high sound for the light coloured and the dark coloured went with the low sound. A similar result was found for size—sound in the expected direction (larger = lower; smaller = higher). Some of the associations found would be of particular interest to consumer psychologists. Adding red colouring to a sucrose solution makes it taste sweeter although no sweetening was added (Johnson & Clydesdale, 1982 cited by Spector & Maurer, op. cit., p. 182) and even when the added colour is incongruent with the natural colour there is a synesthetic effect as a lemon solution coloured red is perceived to have a stronger lemon smell than a pink lemon one which has a stronger lemon smell than colourless lemon solution (Zellner & Kautz, 1990 cited by Spector & Maurer, op. cit., p. 182).
So there appears to be good evidence that being able to make consistent links across the senses is not exclusive to small groups of children or adults who are described as synesthetic. It’s not an unusual phenomenon and most people can produce what I will call consistent synesthetic descriptions although they may not experience synesthesia . This characteristic of human cognition needs to be explained and once we do this we shall see the way through to explaining much of what comes under the heading of ‘embodied cognition ’. The bridge is called ‘metaphor ’ and although it’s not the only way in, it is relevant for consumer psychologists and can be used in for example the analysis of advertising.
Metaphor
In 1980, Metaphors We Live By written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson was published and a similar book with the intriguing title of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things by Lakoff emerged in 1987. Both caused a stir in the academic community, especially for those psychologists involved with the psychology of language as the claims made metaphor a key construct for anyone concerned with models of the mind. To some extent this was an idea whose time had come. Lakoff (1987) for example took metaphor beyond just an interesting feature or trope of language. He also argued that dualism where mind was a separate system from the body (op. cit., p. 9) was to be rejected and that we do not all think with the same conceptual system. But before discussing these ideas, let’s see what metaphor in the classical sense means.
A metaphor is “A figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable” (Metaphor, n.d.). That describes the linguistic phenomenon (figure of speech) but we need to add the two concepts of subject and vehicle. If I say ‘love is blind’ rather th
an the literal expression ‘love is an emotion’ I am ascribing to the subject (or tenor as it’s sometimes called) which is ‘love’ the attribution ‘can’t see certain things’ by using the vehicle ‘blind’. I am breaking a rule in literal language use by describing an abstract noun with a human quality and that can flag up to the reader that a metaphorical meaning of the phrase is intended. ‘Love’ is then transported into a world of human qualities.
Of course metaphors are used in a more sophisticated way than this and complex structures of images, feelings and extra meaning can be created in extended discourse using this simple technique. The function of metaphor can be both poetic and instructive. The former is used for example when the vehicle carries the tenor into a semantic area which is novel and illuminating and seen as aesthetic or evocative of profound emotion. An instructive metaphor would be one where the tenor(s) are difficult to grasp or are abstract and they are then ‘carried across’ into a more concrete domain. Abstract concepts such as the economy and inflation are metaphorically transmuted into steam engines driving and overheating. Balloons are inflated and bubbles that thankfully will (eventually) burst. However the sort of metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson are referring to when they talk of various basic metaphors such as ARGUMENT is WAR (Lakoff & Johnson , 1980, pp. 5–7), is inferred from a system of metaphors and is a cultural interpretation, albeit a sophisticated and informed interpretation of discourse. For example the way we talk about argument uses expressions like ‘I demolished his argument’ and ‘your claims are indefensible’ (op. cit., p. 5) are examples of argument being like war. Therefore metaphors can be and are used systematically and these systems frame our thinking. 20