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Hi! Welcome to a brief introduction to the Psychology of Consumer Behaviour. GSSC1026
I'm Karen Hamilton from the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at George Brown College
There's an evangelical mission afoot
It's the Reverend Billy's unholy war on consumption
The Reverend of the Church of Stop Shopping
has just exorcized the demons from a cash register
and yelled out the warnings of The Shopocalypse!
Adbusters is telling us to turn off our TVs and stop shopping on Buy Nothing Day
The American president goes on TV after 9/11 and tells everyone to go out and shop.
And we do SHOP
We live in a world of constant sensation
colours, sounds and odours
rarely are we away from a marketing pitch
We are no longer surprised as the Whizmark urinal communicator speaks about a product
or if a basketball player does his hair in the shape of a Goodyear tire.
Manufacturers are spending more to design packages that blink, beep, yell and waft scents at us
and neuromarketers are using modern techniques like magnetic resonance imaging
to see what is going on in our brains when we react to a product
Have we turned into Pavlov's Dogs
going about our lives until we hear the bell
that makes us take out our wallets and spend, spend, spend?
Why do we buy?
Do we buy things because of need?
Or is it because of a want that a marketer has convinced us we need?
Just how does a marketer convince us to buy one particular product over another
even though the other may be better or lower priced?
And why do we become loyal to one particular brand?
Are we less happy because of the gap we see in what the media tells us we need and what we have?
In the Psychology of Consumer Behaviour we'll look at how
perception, learning, memory, attitudes and group behaviour
are used by marketers to influence the consumer decision making process
We'll look at the marketing process from the perspective of a marketer
as well as from the perspective of a discriminating consumer
and we'll learn about how possessions influence the way we feel about ourselves and others.
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