Definition of Consumer Learning

Introduction

Marketers are concerned with how individuals learn because they want to teach them, in their roles as consumers, about products, product attributes, and potential consumer benefits; about where to buy their products, how to use them, how to maintain them, and even how to dispose off them. Marketing strategies are based on communicating with the consumer.

Marketers want their communications to be noted, believed, remembered, and recalled.

For these reasons, they are interested in every aspect of the learn-ing process.

There is no single, universal theory of how people learn.

There are two major schools of thought concerning the learning process: one consists of Behavioral learning theories, the other of cognitive learning theories. Cognitive theorists view learning as a function of purely mental processes, although behavioral theorists focus almost exclusively on observable behaviors (responses) that occur as the result of exposure to stimuli.

Consumer Learning

Consumer learning can be thought of as the process by which individuals acquire the purchase and consumption knowledge and experience that they apply to future related behavior. Several points in this definition are worth noting.

First, consumer learning is a process; that is, it continually evolves and changes as a result of newly acquired knowledge eor from actual experience.

Both newly acquired knowledge and personal experience serve as feedback to the individual and provide the basis for future behav-ior in similar situations.

The role of experience in learning does not mean that all learning is deliberately sought. A great deal of learning is also incidental, acquired by accident or without much effort. The term learning encompasses the total range of learning, from simple, almost reflexive responses to the learning of abstract concepts and complex problem solving. c) Most learning theorists recognize the existence of different types of learning and explain the differences through the use of distinctive models of learning. Despite their different viewpoints, learning theorists in general agree that in order for learning to occur, certain basic elements must be present—motivation, cues, response, and reinforcement.

Motivation - Motivation is based on needs and goals.

The degree of relevance, or involvement, with the goal, is critical as to how motivated the consumer is to search for information about a product. Uncovering consumer motives is one of the prime tasks of marketers, who try to teach consumer segments why their prod-uct will best fulfill their needs.

Cues - If motives serve to stimulate learning, cues are the stimuli that give direction to the motives.

In the marketplace, price, styling, packaging, advertising, and store displays all serve as cues to help consumers fulfill their needs. Cues serve to direct consumer drives when they are consistent with their expectations.

Response - How individuals react to a cue—how they behave— constitutes their response. A response is not tied to a need in a one-to-one fashion. A need or motive may evoke a whole variety of responses. The response a consumer makes depends heavily on previous learning; that, in turn, depends on how related responses were reinforced previously.

Reinforcement - Reinforcement increases the likelihood that a specific response will occur in the future as the result of particular cues or stimuli.

Behavioral Learning Theories

Behavioral learning theories are sometimes called stimulus response theories. a) When a person responds in a predictable way to a known stimulus, he or she is said to have “learned.” Behavioral theories are most concerned with the inputs and outcomes of learning, not the process. Two theories relevant to marketing are classical conditioning and instrumental (or operant) conditioning.

Classical Conditioning

Early classical conditioning theorists regarded all organisms as passive recipients.

Conditioning involved building automatic responses to stimuli. Ivan Pavlov was the first to describe conditioning and to propose it as a general model of how learning occurs.

For Pavlov, conditioned learning results when a stimulus that is paired with another stimulus elicits a known response and serves to produce the same response when used alone.

He used dogs to demonstrate his theories.

The dogs were hungry and highly motivated to eat.

Pavlov sounded a bell and then immediately applied a meat paste to the dogs’ tongues, which caused them to salivate.

After a sufficient number of repetitions of the bell sound, followed almost immediately by the food, the bell alone caused the dogs to salivate.

In a consumer behavior context, an unconditioned stimulus might consist of a well-known brand symbol (e.g., the Microsoft “windows” icon) that implies technological superiority and trouble-free operation (the unconditioned response).

Conditioned stimuli might consist of new products bearing well-known symbols.

Cognitive Associative Learning

Recent conditioning theory views classical conditioning as the learning of associations among events that allows the organism to anticipate and “represent” its environment. The relationship (i.e., contiguity) between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus (the bell and the meat paste) influenced the dogs’ expectations, which in turn influenced their behavior salivation). Classical conditioning is seen as cognitive associative learning not the acquisition of new reflexes, but the acquisition of new knowledge about the world.

Optimal conditioning—that is, the creation of a strong association between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US)—requires forward conditioning; that is, the CS should precede the US, repeated pairings of the CS and the US, a CS and US that logically belong together, a CS that is novel and unfamiliar, and a US that is biologically or symbolically salient. Under Neo-Pavlovian conditioning, the consumer can be viewed as an information seeker who uses logical and perceptual relations among events, along with his or her own preconceptions, to form a sophisticated representation of the world.

Strategic Applications of Classical Conditioning

Three basic concepts can be derived from classical conditioning:

repetitin, stimulus generalization, and stimulus discrimination.

Repetition works by increasing the strength of the association and by slowing the process of forgetting.

After a certain number of repetitions retention declines.

This effect is known as advertising wear out and can be de-creased by varying the advertising messages.

Wear out may be avoided by varying the message through cosmetic variation or substantive variation.

According to classical conditioning theorists, learning depends not only on repetition, but also on the ability of individuals to generalize.

Stimulus generalization explains why imitative “me too” products succeed in the marketplace: consumers confuse them with the original product they have seen advertised.

It also explains why manufacturers of private label brands try to make their packaging closely resemble the national brand leaders. The principle of stimulus generalization is applied by marketers to product line, form, and category extensions.

In product line extensions, the marketer adds related products to an already established brand, knowing that the new product is more likely to be adopted when it is associated with a known and trusted brand name.

Marketers offer product form extensions that include different sizes, different colors, and even different flavors.

Product category extensions generally target new market seg-ments.

Family branding—the practice of marketing a whole line of company products under the same brand name—is another strategy that capitalizes on the consumer’s ability to generalize favorable brand associations from one product to the next. Retail private branding often achieves the same effect as family branding.

Stimulus discrimination is the opposite of stimulus generalization and results in the selection of specific stimulus from among similar stimuli.

The consumer’s ability to discriminate among similar stimuli is the basis of positioning strategy, which seeks to establish a unique image for a brand in the consumer’s mind. The key to stimulus discrimination is effective positioning, a major com-petitive advantage.

The image, or position, that a product or service has in the mind of the consumer is critical to its success.

Unlike the imitator who hopes consumers will generalize their perceptions and attribute special characteristics of the market leader’s products to their own products, market leaders want the consumer to discriminate among similar stimuli. Most product differentiation strategies are designed to distinguish a product or brand from that of competitors on the basis of an at-tribute that is relevant, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. It often is quite difficult to unseat a brand leader once stimulus discrimination has occurred.

In general, the longer the period of learning—of associating a brand name with a specific product—the more likely the con-sumer is to discriminate, and the less likely to generalize the stimulus. The principles of classical conditioning provide the theoretical underpinnings for many marketing applications.

Repetition, stimulus generalization, and stimulus discrimina-tion are all major applied concepts that help explain consumer behavior.

Instrumental Conditioning

Like classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning requires a link between a stimulus and a response. a) However, in instrumental conditioning, the stimulus that results in the most satisfactory response is the one that is learned. Instrumental learning theorists believe that learning occurs through a trial-and-error process, with habits formed as a result of rewards received for certain responses or behaviors. b) Although classical conditioning is useful in explaining how consumers learn very simple kinds of behaviors, instrumental conditioning is more helpful in explaining complex, goal-directed activities. According to American psychologist B. F. Skinner, most individual learning occurs in a controlled environment in which individuals are “rewarded” for choosing an appropriate behavior.c) In consumer behavior terms, instrumental conditioning suggests that consumers learn by means of a trial-and error process in which some purchase behaviors result in more favorable outcomes (i.e., rewards) than other purchase behaviors.

d)A favorable experience is instrumental in teaching the individual to repeat a specific behavior. Like Pavlov, Skinner developed his model of learning by working with animals. ) In a marketing context, the consumer who tries several brands and styles of jeans before finding a style that fits her figure (positive reinforcement) has engaged in instrumental learning.

Reinforcement of Behavior

Skinner distinguished two types of reinforcement (or reward) influence, which provided that the likelihood for a response would be repeated.

The first type, positive reinforcement, consists of events that strengthen the likelihood of a specific response.

Negative reinforcement is an unpleasant or negative outcome that also serves to encourage a specific behavior.

Either positive or negative reinforcement can be used to elicit a desired response.

Negative reinforcement should not be confused with punishment, which is designed to discourage behavior.

Forgetting and extinction

when a learned response is no longer reinforced, it diminishes to the point of extinction; that is, to the point at which the link between the stimulus and the expected reward is eliminated.

Forgetting is often related to the passage of time; this is known as the process of decay.

Marketers can overcome forgetting through repetition and can combat extinction through the deliberate enhancement of con-sumer satisfaction.

Reinforcement schedules—marketers have found that product quality must be consistently high and provide customer satisfaction with each use for desired consumer behavior to continue. Marketers have identified three types of reinforcement schedules: Total (or continuous) reinforcement, Systematic (fixed ratio) reinforcement, and Random (variable ratio) reinforcement. Variable ratios tend to engender high rates of desired behavior and are somewhat resistant to extinction— perhaps because, for many consumers, hope springs eternal. Shaping—the reinforcement of behaviors that must be performed by consumers before the desired behavior can be performed is called shaping. Shaping increases the probabilities that certain desired consumer behavior will occur.

Modeling or Observational Learning

Learning theorists have noted that a considerable amount of learning takes place in the absence of direct reinforcement, either positive or negative, through a process psychologists call modeling or observational learning (also called vicarious learning). They observe how others behave in response to certain situations (stimuli), the ensuing results (reinforcement) that occur, and they imitate (model) the positively reinforced behavior when faced with similar situations. a) Modeling is the process through which individuals learn behavior by observing the behavior of others and the consequences of such behavior. b) Their role models are usually people they admire because of such traits as appearance, accomplishment, skill, and even social class. c) Children learn much of their social behavior and consumer behavior by observing their older siblings or their parents. Advertisers recognize the importance of observational learning in their selection of models, whether celebrities or unknowns. Sometimes ads depict negative consequences for certain types of behavior. d) This is particularly true of public policy ads, which may show the negative consequences of smoking, of driving too fast, or taking drugs

Cognitive Learning Theory

Not all learning is the result of repeated trials. a) Learning also takes place as the result of consumer thinking and problem solving. Cognitive learning is based on mental activity. Cognitive learning theory holds that the kind of learning most characteristic of human beings is problem solving and it gives some control over their environment.

Information Processing

The human mind processes the information it receives as input much as a computer does.

Information processing is related to both the consumer’s cogni-tive ability and the complexity of the information to be processed. Individuals differ in terms of their ability to form mental images and in their ability to recall information. The more experience a consumer has with a product category, the greater his or her ability to make use of product information.

How Consumers Store, Retain, and Retrieve Information

The structure of memory—because information processing occurs in stages, it is believed that content is stored in the memory in separate storehouses for further processing; a sensory store, a short-term store, and a long-term store. Sensory store—all data comes to us through our senses, however, our senses do not transmit information as whole images.

The separate pieces of information are synchronized as a single image.

This sensory store holds the image of a sensory input for just a second or two.

This suggests that it’s easy for marketers to get information into the consumer’s sensory store, but hard to make a lasting impression.

Short-term store—if the data survives the sensory store, it is moved to the short-term store.

This is our working memory.

If rehearsal—the silent, mental repetition of material— takes place, then the data is transferred to the long-term store.

If data is not rehearsed and transferred, it is lost in a few seconds.

Long-term store—once data is transferred to the long-term store it can last for days, weeks, or even years. Rehearsal and encoding—the amount of information available for delivery from the short-term store to the long-term store depends on the amount of rehearsal an individual gives to it.

Encoding is the process by which we select and assign a word or visual image to represent a perceived object.

Learning visually takes less time than learning verbal information.

How much consumers encode depends on their cognitive commit-ment to the intake of the information and their gender. Informa-tion overload takes place when the consumer is presented with too much information.

It appears to be a function of the amount of information and time frame of that information.

There are contradictory studies on what constitutes overload.

The difficulty is determining the point of “overload.” Retention— information is constantly organized and reorganized as new links between chunks of information are forged. m) In fact, many infor-mation-processing theorists view the long-term store as a network consisting of nodes (i.e., concepts) with links among them.

As individuals gain more knowledge they expand their network of relationships, and sometimes their search for additional informa-tion.

This process is known as activation, which involves relating new data to old to make the material more meaningful.

The total package of associations brought to mind when a cue is activated is called a schema.

Research has found that older adults appear to be more reliant on schema-based information processing strategies than younger adults.

Consumers’ information search is often dependent upon how sim-ilar or dissimilar (discrepant) presented products are to product categories already stored in memory.

Consumers recode what they have already encoded to include larg-er amounts of information (chunking).

The degree of prior knowledge is an important consideration.

Knowledgeable consumers can take in more complex chunks of information than those who are less knowledgeable in the product category.

Information is stored in long-term memory in two ways: episodi-cally (i.e., by the order in which it is acquired) and semantically (according to significant concepts).

Many learning theorists believe that memories stored semantically are organized into frameworks by which we integrate new data with previous experience. Retrieval is the process by which we re-cover information from long-term storage.

A great deal of research is focused on how individuals retrieve information from memory.

Studies show that consumers tend to remember the product’s ben-efits, rather than its attributes.

Motivated consumers are likely to spend time interpreting and elaborating on information they find relevant to their needs; and are likely to activate such relevant knowledge from long-term memory.

Research findings suggest that incongruent (e.g. unexpected) el-ements pierce consumers’ perceptual screens and improve the memorability of an ad when these elements are relevant to the ad-vertising message. a) Incongruent elements that are not relevant to an ad also pierce the consumer’s perceptual screen but provide no memorability for the product. Interference effects are caused by confusion with competing ads and result in a failure to retrieve. b) Advertisements for competing brands or for other products made by the same manufacturer can lower the consumer’s ability to re-member advertised brand information. c) There are actually two kinds of interference.

New learning can interfere with the retrieval of previously stored material.

Old learning can interfere with the recall of recently learned material.

Limited and Extensive Information Processing

For a long time, consumer researchers believed that all consumers passed through a complex series of mental and behavioral stages in arriving at a purchase decision (extensive information processing).

These stages ranged from awareness (exposure to information), to evaluation (preference, attitude formation), to behavior (purchase), to final evaluation (adoption or rejection). This same series of stages is often presented as the consumer adoption process. Some theorists began to realize that there were some purchase situations that simply did not call for extensive information processing and evaluation; that sometimes consumers simply went from awareness of a need to a routine purchase,

without a great deal of information search and mental evaluation (limited information processing).Purchases of minimal personal importance were called low involvement purchases, and complex, search-oriented purchases were considered high-involvement purchases.

Involvement Theory

Involvement theory developed from research into hemispherical lateralization or split-brain theory.

The premise is that the right and left hemispheres of the brain spe-cialize in the kinds of information they process.

The left hemisphere is responsible for cognitive activities such as reading, speaking, and attribution information processing.

The right hemisphere of the brain is concerned with nonverbal, timeless, pictorial, and holistic information.

Involvement Theory and Media Strategy

Individuals passively process and store right-brain information.

Because it is largely pictorial, TV viewing is considered a right hemisphere activity.

Passive learning was thought to occur through repeated exposures to low-involvement information.

The left hemisphere is associated with high-involvement information.

Recent research suggests that pictorial cues help recall and familiarity, although verbal cues trigger cognitive functions, encouraging evaluation.

The right-brain processing theory stresses the importance of the visual component of advertising, including the creative use of symbols.

Pictorial cues are more effective at generating recall and familiarity with the product, although verbal cues (which trigger left-brain processing) generate cognitive activity that encourages consumers to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the product.

There are limitations to split-brain theory.

Research suggests the spheres of the brain do not always operate independently of each other, but work together to process information. There is evidence that both sides of the brain are capable of low- and high-involvement. It does seem the right side is more cognitively oriented and the left side more affectively oriented.

Involvement Theory and Consumer Relevance

A consumer’s level of involvement depends on the degree of personal relevance that the product holds for the consumer.

High-involvement purchases are those that are very important to the consumer in terms of perceived risk.

Low-involvement purchases are purchases that are no very important to the consumer, hold little relevance, and little perceived risk.

Highly involved consumers find fewer brands acceptable (they are called narrow categorizers); uninvolved consumers are likely to be receptive to a greater number of advertising messages regarding the purchase and will consider more brands (they are broad categorizers).

Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion

Central and peripheral routes to persuasion—the central premise is that consumers are more likely to weigh information carefully about a product and to devote considerable cognitive effort to evaluating it when they are highly involved with the product category and vice versa.

Use of the central route to persuasion is more effective in marketing for high-involvement purchases.

The peripheral route to persuasion is more effective for low-involvement purchases. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) suggests that a person’s level of involvement during message processing is the critical factor in determining the most effective route of persuasion.

Thus, when involvement is high, consumers follow the central route and base their attitudes or choices on the message arguments.

When involvement is low, they follow the peripheral route and rely more heavily on other message elements to form attitudes or make product choices.

The marketing implications of the elaboration likelihood model are clear:

For high-involvement purchases, marketers should use arguments stressing the strong, solid, high-quality attributes of their products—thus using the central (i.e., highly cognitive) route.

For low-involvement purchases, marketers should use the peripheral route to persuasion, focusing on the method of presentation rather than on the content of the message(e.g., through the use of celebrity spokespersons or highly visual and symbolic advertisements).

Measures of Involvement

Researchers have defined and conceptualized involvement in a variety of ways including ego involvement, commitment, communication involvement, purchase importance, extent of information search, persons, products situations, and purchase decisions.

Some studies have tried to differentiate between brand involvement and product involvement.

Others differentiate between situational, enduring, and response involvement.

The lack of a clear definition about the essential components of involvement poses some measurement problems.

Researchers who regard involvement as a cognitive state are concerned with the measurement of ego involvement, risk perception, and purchase importance.

Researchers who focus on the behavioral aspects of involvement measure such factors as the search for and evaluation of product information.

Others argue that involvement should be measured by the degree of importance the product has to the buyer. Because of the many different dimensions and conceptualizations of involvement, it makes sense to develop an involvement profile, rather than to measure a single involvement level.

Marketing Applications of Involvement

Involvement theory has a number of strategic applications for the marketer. f) The left-brain (cognitive processing)/right-brain (passive processing) paradigm seems to have strong implications for the content, length, and presentation of both print and television advertisements. g) By understanding the nature of low-involvement information processing, marketers can take steps to increase consumer involvement with their ads. Measures of Consumer Learning Market share and the number of brand-loyal consumers are the dual goals of consumer learning.

Brand-loyal customers provide the basis for a stable and growing market share.

Brands with larger market shares have proportionately larger groups of loyal buyers.

Recognition and Recall Measures

Recognition and recall tests are conducted to determine whether consumers remember seeing an ad, the extent to which they have read it or seen it and can recall its content, their resulting attitudes toward the product and the brand, and their purchase intentions.

Recognition tests are based on aided recall, although recall tests use unaided recall.

In recognition tests, the consumer is shown an ad and asked whether he or she remembers seeing it and can remember any of its salient points.

In recall tests, the consumer is asked whether he or she has read a specific magazine or watched a specific television show, and if so, can recall any ads or commercials seen, the product advertised, the brand, and any salient points about the product.

The Learning Processes Among The Customer Roles

Comparison of Learning Theories