eLearning Session

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain the meaning of and relationship between perceptions and sensations and discuss some basic facts about the classic five sensory receptors: vision, smell, hearing, touch and taste.
2. Describe how sensory thresholds are used by marketers, including marketing applications of Weber's Law.
3. Outline the process through which our sensory systems select, organize and interpret stimuli, including pre-attentive processing; perceptual selection; organization and categorization; interpretation and elaboration.
4. Describe some basic tools consumers use in primitive categorization, including grouping, figure, and ground, and develop marketing applications using these three tools.
5. Explain how elaboration of marketing stimuli influences consumer perceptions and preferences.
6. Define some basic features of perceptual preferences and consumer tastes.

• Perception is a process of giving meaning to sensory stimuli. People act and react on the basis of their perceptions, the way they sense and interpret the world around them.
• Consumers' perceptions are fundamental to understanding acquisition, consumption, and disposal of goods and services. The symbols used in language and writing, in marketing communication in all its forms, gain concrete meaning by reference to perceptions. Hence, in a very basic way, perceptions underlie preferences. When consumers order curry chicken for dinner or buy silk lingerie or listen to Nine Inch Nails or select Magie Noire as their evening fragrance or refuse to buy plaids even when plaids are the fashion statement for the year, they reflect their sensory preferences-sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings that they like over other sensations. Of course, culture, family, friends, motivations, experience, and a myriad of other factors influence these sensory preferences.
• Effective use of marketing communication, packaging, design of consumer food products, creation of "servicescapes" and retail environments involves sophisticated understanding and management of sensation and perception.
• The study of perceptions is a basic way to try to understand consumers. When we speak of the perception of quality, risk, or perceived value, we are clearly talking about something that refers to perception, although the actual sensations at the root of these judgments may seem far away, transformed by judgment, thought and logic. Nevertheless, sensation is an important ingredient of consumer learning and decision making.
• Underlying both meanings of perception (i.e., the immediate sense of delight in the taste of something sweet versus the judgment that the colors in a gown do or do not go together) is sensation, the immediate and direct response of the sensory systems to stimuli. Sensations vary between persons, social groups, and cultures.
• In this chapter we examine the cultural, social, psychological, and physiological bases of perception. Perception is closely related to needs, motivation and involvement (Chapter 11); experience, learning and knowledge (Chapter 12); and decision making and attitude formation (Chapter 13).

• Consciousness is the experience of knowing our sensations as though they were displayed before us, but how this display works is enigmatic. There is little about neural activity that helps us understand the subjective judgment we make about sensations. We often do not recognize that our perception of the world is created is created through indirect inference. Psychologists call this bias phenomenal absolutism and point out that we often assume that all other observers perceive the situation as we do. If others respond differently than we do, we assume it is because they are acting on different perceptual inferences. An important conclusion is that perceptions are learned as part of the enculturation process and, as a result, may be manipulated and altered.
• The subjective nature of perception presents challenges for global marketers, as illustrated in Consumer Chronicles 9.1. Culture and the social world can play an important role in influencing consumers' subjective perceptions and interpretations.

Consumer Chronicles 9.1: The Subjective Nature of Perception (50.0K)

Sensory stimuli are inputs to the senses. People detect stimuli through a variety of sensory receptors. These are the organs of perception. Although we may think of them in terms of the classic five (vision, smell, hearing, touch, and taste), it turns out that our organs or perception are more numerous and specialized than this. Indeed, some researchers suggest that there are as many as 32 different sensory systems. While recognizing the diversity of our perceptual apparatus, we nonetheless organize our discussion of sensation around the five traditional systems.

1. Sensory Systems and Marketing Effects
• There is a debate about whether sensations are autonomic responses (i.e., automatic neural responses) or learned responses (i.e., the product of enculturation). This issue is important for marketers because they may rely on simple physical stimuli to produce certain responses in consumers.
1. Vision
• Human eyes have separate mechanisms that gather the light, pick out an important or novel image, focus it precisely, pinpoint it in space, and follow it. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes.
• Because vision is a dominant sense in humans, it has been studied in great detail and more is known of it than the other senses. Studies find that exposure to warm hues (red-orange-yellow) raises blood pressure, heart rate, and perspiration, whereas exposure to cool hues (green-blue) has the opposite effect.
• Color can play an important role in affecting the success of marketing stimuli, such as the colors used in advertising or package design. Colors that stimulate excitement appear whitish, as if the color white had been mixed in to create a pastel effect. Colors that evoke relaxation are fully saturated. That is, they have a high level of pigment in them. Much of the research on the role of color in marketing is anecdotal. In brief, marketers frequently find that they don't have firm foundations for making decisions about color, even though they realize that such decisions are quite important.
2. Smell
• The sense of smell is less important for humans than many other animals. Smells tend to be described in terms of how they feel emotionally (e.g., "disgusting""delightful").
• Smell is the most direct of our senses. Nothing is more memorable than a smell.
• The relationship between odors, thoughts, and behaviors is not a simple one. Odor greatly affects our evaluation of things and people. Odor also affects consumer responses in a multitude of other ways. For example, people are more alert in a room with a light, pleasant smell. As marketers seek to tap consumers' feelings and memories directly, aromachology and the home fragrance industry has become a growing aspect of the economy.
• Sometimes odors are used as a way of communicating product attribute information, such as with perfume or house cleaners. However, marketers have become interested in the notion that pleasant scents that are not necessarily related to the products being sold can also affect consumer feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
3. Hearing
• Sound is an onrushing, cresting and withdrawing wave of air molecules that roll to our ears, where they make the eardrum vibrate and move the three tiniest bones in the body.
• What people hear occupies a large range of intensities. People have a surprising ability to move some sounds to the almost unnoticeable rear and drag others right up front.
• Sound patterns can create a mood of relaxation or stimulation.
4. Touch
• Our skin stands between the world and us, and it serves many functions. It protects us and envisions us. Most of all, it harbors the sense of touch. There are many complex sensations that constitute touch, and various parts of the body are much more sensitive than others. In language, there are many metaphors for touch. We call our emotions "feelings," and we care most deeply when something "touches" us. Touch affects the whole organism.
• Touch is critical in the psychological and physical development of children. Sustained touching reduces heart rate and has a calming effect.
5. Taste
• What people eat suggests the powerful role of culture in determining taste.
• Taste is also an intimate sense. As Consumer Chronicles 9.3 illustrates, how people taste things may be as individual as fingerprints. Every culture uses food as a sign of approval or commemoration. Food is a big source of physiological and emotional pleasure in our lives.

Consumer Chronicles 9.3: The Taste of Olive Oil (50.0K)

• Taste buds are exceedingly small, and adults have about 10,000 grouped by theme (salt, sour, sweet, bitter), at various sites in the mouth. In fact, a food's flavor includes its texture, smell, temperature, color, and painfulness (as in spices), among many other features.
• In the United States there is a growing segment of health-conscious consumers who are concerned about the cholesterol and the fat content of the foods they eat. At the same time, there is a segment of consumers who indulge and prefer foods high in fat, those are rich and savory as possible (see Consumer Chronicles 9.4).

Consumer Chronicles 9.4: A Sensory Preference for Fatty Foods (50.0K)

2. Sensory Thresholds
• Sensation is provoked, not by some unit of sensation, but by changes in sensory input. It's these differences in input that we perceive. Several differences in input, or sensory thresholds, are important in marketing; these include the absolute threshold, and the differentialthreshold, or the just noticeable difference.
1. Absolute Threshold
• The absolute threshold is the lowest level of input to be detected by the various sensory receptors in the human body. Some examples are given in Consumer Chronicles 9.5. The absolute threshold should not be confused with the threshold of consciousness.

Consumer Chronicles 9.5: Some Approximate Detection Threshold Values (50.0K)

• Marketers sometimes make use of sensations that are not obvious to customers.
• Marketing stimuli must reach the absolute threshold if they are to affect consumers. The absolute threshold may increase for physiological reasons, such as increasing age. Physiological factors may reduce the likelihood of some persons receiving sensory input. Thus, younger people tend to be more sensitive to olfactory sensations than elderly people.
• The absolute threshold also varies with demographic factors.
• Consumers adapt to this sensory environment in part by "disattending", by applying perceptual filters to screen out unwanted stimuli.
• Marketers frequently attempt to provoke consumers into re-attending by crossing the absolute threshold in novel ways. Acoustic researchers have found that the human voice has the most impact in the frequency range between two and six kilohertz.
2. Weber's Law and the JND
• Another important sensory threshold is the just noticeabledifference (JND), or differential threshold. This conveys the idea of the minimum change in sensation necessary for aperson to detect it. Note that JND differs from "absolute threshold" in that the former focuses on changes in sensations, not minimum sensation.
• Any first time touch or change in touch (from gentle to stinging, say) sends the brain into a flurry of activity. However, an additional dose of stimulus at the same level results in a much lower level of excitation of sensory preceptors. To explain this phenomenon, a theorem known as Weber's Law states that the stronger the initial sensory stimulus, the greater the additional intensity needed for the second stimulus to be perceived as different. A corollary of this theorem is that an additional level of stimulus equivalent to the JND must be added for the majority of people to perceive a difference between the resulting stimulus and the initial stimulus.
• The most important implication of Weber's Law for marketers is the necessity of determining the JND to optimize any changes in the marketing mix. Sometimes it will be optimal to introduce stimuli or changes in the marketing mix that are equal to the JND. In this case, the challenge for marketers is to determine the amount of change necessary in a given component of the marketing mix, in particular marketing environments for particular market segments. Change less that the JND is wasted because it is not perceived.
• According to Weber's Law, the level of a just noticeable difference will depend on the strength of the initial stimulus.
• Sometimes a marketer's objective is to change the product without the consumer noticing. In this case, the key is to stay just below a noticeable difference.
• Often, firms want to introduce changes in products and services that are not readily discernible to customers, but save the firm money or else re-position the brand (e.g., reductions in product size, changes in package design).
• The strategy of downsizing the package or decreasing contents is a popular way of implementing price increases.
• Packaged-goods marketers frequently change the package design but usually do so in small stages. As a result, consumers often do not notice these subtle changes in package design, color, or wording.

• People think of our senses as windows on the world, but a primary function of sensory systems is to irrelevant or useless information. As such, our sensory systems serve as selection systems. Perhaps the most striking trend in the psychology and physiology of perception in the past two decades is our increasing understanding of the interactive and constructive nature of ordinary awareness.
• Our experience of the world involves a wide range of unconscious inferences about perceptual categories that we create from personal experience. For example, we cannot immediately know whether a given chair is physically closer than others because we do not possess a direct monocular sense of distance. Instead, if we assume that two objects we are looking at are the same size, then we infer the one that looks larger would be closer to us. That is, we make a perception about the proximity of the chair based on our personal constructs or categories.
• The process of perception is divided into four parts:
1. pre-attentive processing
2. selection
3. organization
4. interpretation and elaboration

1. Pre-attentive Processing
• Perception begins with an exposure to a stimulus. By exposure we mean that the stimulus is in sufficient proximity to the sensory receptors that the opportunity exists for sensory activation.
• Pre-attentive processing refers to the simultaneous preconscious monitoring of all sensory channels for events that will require a shift inattention. This kind of pre-attentive processing is what makes it possible for us to suddenly hear our name spoken across a crowded, noisy room; or wake at the cry of a baby but not a garbage truck.
• Considerable research suggests that preconscious processes operate in the selection of stimuli for further processing.
2. Selection
• There's an extraordinary amount of competition for people's attention in the marketplace.
• As explained by the principle of sensory thresholds, as the background becomes more saturated with sensation, people's filters become stronger and more immune to each individual sensory input.
• Perceptional selection refers to the fact that consumers select only a small portion of the stimuli to which they are exposed for consciousprocessing, or what we might term focal attention. To get the consumers' focal attention, an escalation of sensory impulses is required.
• Merely escalating the intensity of stimuli is likely to be an ineffective way of cutting through perceptual filters and provoking potential customers to pay attention. Many poorly targeted direct-mail pieces, for example, are discarded, unopened and unread. A variety of factors will lead to increased selection, as we outline in the next several paragraphs.
1. Motives
• One of the most important factors influencing selection of stimuli for further processing is consumers' motives and goals. Consumers' goals serve to direct their attention to information that is relevant or important to those goals. This type of need-specific attention is called perceptual vigilance.
• The idea of perceptual vigilance has important implications for marketers. For example, producers of radio commercials are advised to include personal references in their spots. The use of a question format in advertisements appears to have the capacity to draw attention to a message and thus engage listeners.
• An important application of perceptual vigilance for marketers is to target consumers whose needs have changed. During transitional periods, consumers may be especially attentive to relevant information that addresses their changing needs.
2. Nature of the Stimulus
• Some of the time, the perceptual stimulus attracts the consumer's attention. Involuntary attention can occur via the orientationreflex, when surprise, threat, or violation of expectations elicits attention automatically. A variety of mechanisms increase attention to messages. For example, atypicality of execution format can provoke perceptual selection. Thus, black and white commercials on color television, as well as clear advertising pages in opaque magazine pages, will elicit attention. These particular examples also illustrate that contrast effects elicit attention. More generally, perceptual surprises may increase the likelihood of selection. Increased size of advertisements or life-size images of products are surprising, as in the Salvatore Ferragamo shoes ad shown below.

Size Matters: Salvatore Ferragamo Shoes (50.0K)

3. Organization
• The third part in the perceptual process is perceptual organization. Consumers classify perceptions into categories (categorization) and apply prior knowledge about the categories to organize them. Basically, categorization involves comparison between a perceived target and categorical knowledge. Categorization is a fundamental sense-making activity that encompasses all forms of stimulus situations. Whenever we intentionally perform any kind of action, say something as ordinary as drinking a soda, attending a class, or exercising, we are using categories. Categorization schemes allow people to give coherence to their general knowledge about other people, objects, and situations.
• A key feature of categories is that they are functional, and, as such, are shaped by personal goals, values, or the need to respond. Whereas early research presented categories as relatively stable structures, recent research emphasizes that categories are influenced by context and by goals or judgment purposes. The formation of a particular goal also leads people to create categories to fit that specific goal. Such categories are referred to as ad hoc categories.
• Different contexts invite people to organize their knowledge structures differently and create categories appropriate to specific contexts.
• The formulation of a particular goal also leads people to create categories to fit that specific goal. Such categories are referred to as ad hoc categories.
• Another key feature of categories is that they are socially and culturally constructed and learned.
• Categorization operates at different levels of abstraction. In this section, on organization perceptions, we are interested in some principles that affect the initial, often automatic, and unconscious categorization of stimuli. We refer to initial classification of an object into a category as primitive categorization. To appreciate the problem of primitive categorization, we need to understand that people derive meaning from the totality of the perceptual information they receive at a given moment. Marketers often make use of our human tendency to make sense of perceptual data through primitive categorization on the basis of partial information. Three especially common illustrations of this tendency are grouping, figure-and-ground discriminations, and the closure principal. Each of these shows how, when presented with ambiguous stimuli, people try to impose familiar categories on their perceptions.
1. Grouping
• In the first case of primitive categorization, grouping, people tend to assume that options found in proximity to one another go together.
• Advertisers and retailers, through grouping, try to create an ambient perceptual environment for their goods and services that creates a particular image for them. In the 1980s, the American wine producer Gallo sought to upgrade its down-market image among wine consumers by picturing upgraded products that some consumers would associate with a more formal, upscale dining situation.

Gallo Wine: Upscale Dining. This Ad Employs the Principle of Grouping (50.0K)

2. Figure-and-ground
• In the second stage of primitive categorization, referred to as figure and ground, people try to determine what aspects ofstimuli we should focus on. We tend to place "important" stimuli in the foreground and move less important stimuli to the background. Classic figure-and-ground tricks developed by psychologist illustrate how we may perceive something as foreground, until an alternative perception is pointed out to us.
• Exhibit 9.1 illustrates the vase/face trick. The figure and ground will shift back and forth as we attempt to see one element, such as faces, and then the other, the vase, as foreground. AN interesting aspect of figure-and-ground problems is that people cannot perceive both objects as figure simultaneously.

  APPLICATIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CLOSURE

Exhibit 9.1: A Classic Figure-and-Ground Problem- What Do You See (50.0K)

• An interesting aspect of figure-and-ground problems is that we cannot perceive both objects as figure simultaneously.
• There are many instances of the use of figure-and-ground principles in marketing. For example, people often say that contrast attracts attention. But what they are really saying is that a stimulus has forced something into the foreground that would otherwise have been treated as a background.
3. Closure
• The third principle of perceptual organization that illustrates the consumer's use of partial cues to complete an image is closure. In radio or television ads, it is not uncommon to repeat a jingle or slogan several times, and then to leave it incomplete as the advertisement ends. Advertisers know that the listener will imagine the final bars of the tune. Through this heightened level of involvement with the ad, the listener is then more likely to remember the message. Justerini & Brooks' clever Christmas time ad for J&B Scotch relies on the audience's tacit know;edge of a popular seasonal song "Jingle Bells" to get them to fill in the missing letters, and Vin & Spirit employed similar techniques to promote Schweppes in the ads below.

  APPLICATIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CLOSURE - PAGE 324

Image A (718.0K)
Image B (718.0K)

4. Gestalt Psychology
• Gestalt psychologists are responsible for much of the work on perceptual organization. These researchers attempt to identify the rules that govern how people perceive patterns in the world.
• The Gestalt perspective is the study of how individuals make sense of the stimuli to which they are exposed.
4. Interpretation and Elaboration
• The fourth part in the perceptual process is interpretation. Obviously, organization and interpretation are intertwined. Both have to do with comprehension and sense making. Whereas the principles of perceptual organization are most often applied unconsciously, at least part of the time, interpretation is a conscious process. The interpretation of perceptual stimuli involves the application of learned associations between perceptual cues, or signs, and meanings to novel stimuli. Interpretation depends on consumers' knowledge structures. At least two different sorts of knowledge structures are important to interpretation.
• At least two different sorts of knowledge structures are important to interpretation. One type, called schemas, includes organized collections of beliefs and feelings that a person has about objects, ideas, people, or situations. The second type of knowledge structure, called scripts, includes sequences of actions associated with objects, ideas, people, or situations. Whether we are aware of it or not, knowledge about cultural roles, settings, goals and event sequences are basic to interpretation.
1. Semiotic Process of Interpretation
• Interpretation comes about through a fundamental semioticprocess that links three components of every stimulus. The semiotic process is how people obtain meaning from signs.
• Trademarks, product symbols and even packages can be tremendously effective product symbols, and ones of great value to firms.
2. Perceptual Inferences
• An important aspect of interpretation is perceptual inferences. Inferences are interpretations that go beyond the information given. Our understanding of how and when consumers make inferences is still limited. Yet, we do know that consumers rarely have complete information. They have to make judgments and purchase decisions about products based on limited or incomplete information. Frequently, consumers use a small number of cues to make inferences. Some inferences are made more or less automatically, and we are largely unconscious of the cues we use in making them.
3. Elaboration
• Sometimes consumer interpretations of perceptual stimuli also includes high levels of elaboration. Elaboration reflects the extent to which perceptual stimuli are integrated with prior knowledgestructures. Interpretation always involves some elaboration (that is, accessing of prior knowledge structures), but this can be at very low levels such as simply recognition. At high levels of elaboration, people engage in processes such as counter arguing, problem solving, daydreaming and fantasizing.Elaboration produces freedom of memory and attitude from the specific details of the original message or its setting. It can even result in a boomerang effect where the attitude change is opposite to that advocated in the persuasive message.
• Of course, stimuli that encourage elaboration can also be enormously effective. Such stimuli are likely to be remembered longer and attitudes formed are likely to be much stronger than those associated with stimuli processed at a lower level of elaboration. For example, one form of high elaboration would be role taking. In the context of advertising, role taking involves placing the self into the ad or product experience.
• Transformational advertising figuratively transforms the viewer watching the ad. Such transformations are likely only when the viewer is highly motivated to process the ad and when the ad contains sufficient ad cues to allow for such a transformation.

• Most consumer perception research deals with perceptual interpretation.
• Perceptual judgements begin with selective attention to perceptual stimuli in the marketing landscape. Through selective exposure and attention consumers form basic images of brands, products, and marketing communications, for instance. They draw basic perceptual inferences about the attributes of these marketing stimuli. Through learning and experience, consumers eventually form summary perceptual judgments that link the sensory stimuli to outcomes they consider probable.
• Because consumers use information selectively, marketers must examine such issues as perceived quality and product country image (PCI) in developing an understanding of particular consumers' perceptual judgments of particular market offerings.

1. Perceived Quality
• Perceived quality has been a central preoccupation in consumer and organization marketing. Perceived quality, whether in reference to a product or service, has been defined as the consumer's evaluative judgment about an entity's overall excellence or superiority in providing desired benefits.Perceived quality can reduce costs, extend market share, increase profitability, and create a differential advantage by erecting barriers to entry and lessening price elasticity.Research suggests that customers may care more about quality than economy, and hence, marketers believe that providing evidence of incremental quality is a key to competitive advantage.
• Perceived quality is a judgment derived by a comparison of performance perceptions against expectations or evaluative standards. Consumers use an array of sensory cues as indicators of quality. Cues are used according to their predictive value, the degree to which consumers associate a given cue with product quality, the confidence value of a cue, and the degree to which consumers have confidence in their ability to use and judge that cueaccurately. The value of cues varies across product categories.
• Consumers rely on both extrinsiccues, such as price, brand name, packaging, store name, country-of-origin and even color, and intrinsiccues such as taste, texture, and aroma when making product quality. Depending on the product category, intrinsic cues also have high predictive and confidence value for consumers.
• Perceived service quality is often measured using the SERVQUAL scale, which contains five genetic dimensions of perceived quality: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The tangibles dimension refers to characteristics of the service provider and the service delivery environment also called the servicescape. Little research has been conducted on combined product/service quality perceptions despite the fact that it has long been recognized that much of what is purchased in the marketplace combines features of products and services.
2. Product-Country Image Effects
• Product-country image (PCI) research has mainly studied country oforigin, or country-of-manufacture, as a cue by consumers to infer beliefs about product attributes. Country of origin is conveyed through packaging, promotional materials, ingredients (Kobe or Nebraska corn-fed beef, for example), and conventional symbols such as national flags. Country-of-origin cues are like other extrinsic cues such as price, brand name, and retailer reputation in that they can be manipulated without changing the physical product. Product-country image also plays a role in judgements about industrial products. Sometimes, however, product-country image is clouded by confusion between country-of-origin and country-of-manufacture.
• Provided that the basic criteria for perceptual selection like vividness, clarity, and intensity are met, consumers' use of country-of-origin cues is determined by their power to predict positive consumption outcomes. This predictive relationship is shaped by product-country images (PIC), which is a schematic mental representation of a country's people, products, culture, and national symbols. Product-country images contain widely shared cultural stereotypes, or simplifying categories.
• Consumers' evaluations of country-of-origin are based in part on a match between product and country. Country-of-origin may relate a product to national identity, which can result in a strong emotional attachment to certain brands and products, such as a second-generation immigrant strongly attached to home country products.
• Product-country image is not merely another cognitive cue, however. It has symbolic and ritual meaning to consumers. Country-of-origin may associate a product with status, authenticity, and exoticness. It links a product to a rich product-country imagery, with sensory, emotional, and ritual connotations. Country-of-origin may relate a product to national identity, which can result in a strong emotional attachment to certain brand and products, such as a second-generation immigrant strongly attached to home-country products.
• Symbolic aspects of PCI may influence consumer preferences and contribute to brand loyalty.
• The term consumer voting captures the normative dimension ofproduct-country images. In other words, by deciding to purchase or avoid a country's products, consumers "vote" for or against the policies of its government.
• PCI may also trigger the norm to buy domestically. Some consumers consider it morally appropriate to buy products that are manufactured or grown domestically.
• Not all products evoke strong product-country image, and not all consumers use product-country images in developing product preferences.
• In short, PCI plays a role in judgments of product and brand quality. The influence of product-country image on behavior varies, but there is no doubt that it plays a role and that its relative importance may in fact equal or exceed that of other extrinsic cues depending on situational and other factors.

• The idea of taste is fundamental to the success of many industries including architecture, interior design, packaging, and fashion.
• The department stores that emerged in Paris and London at the end of the nineteenth century were intended as taste-making instruments, designed to teach and market good taste. American department stores offered for public consumption both elite consumer lifestyles and democratic consumer lifestyles promoted by the decorative arts movement.
• In Sweden, the annual IKEA catalog disstributed in August is an anxiously awaited repository of taste; a corporate effort to limit distribution only to consumers above a certain income threshold was hotly debated in the national press.

www.ikea.com

• Just about every consumer decision reflects sensory preferences and perceptual judgments. Often, we refer to differences between consumers in their sensory preferences as a "matter of taste." Take a moment and imagine what you think we mean by the term taste. Discussions of taste are closely linked to perception. We will use the term to refer to the making of judgments based on ideas of beauty, order, and arrangement.
• There are just a few important general points to make about taste. First, taste is a culturally specific and historically specific preference for certain things. Second, taste is not only about raw sensory stimuli. Third, tastes as a form of cultural capital give us membership in some groups and exclude us from others. Fourth, each culture has arbitrators of taste, like Martha Stewart, or the late Princess Diana, who function to define and change what's tasteful and what's not.
• Consumers often develop their own tastes from elements provided by the taste-making institutions and perceive consumer goods in terms of them. Taste is a matter of individual perception and judgment. But at the same time, taste is part of the social world and helps consumers find their place in that world.