Customer Psychology

This afternoon, I had my very first lecture in Understanding the Customer which I found really interesting. I have always been intrigued by psychology and wanted to learn about and understand all the different factors which determines a persons behavior and how they think.

Understanding the Customer gives an insight on the behavioural aspects of consumers which inturn helps marketers, execute the appropiate means in engaging their auidences. It is a vital part of marketing to understand customer psychology as it plays a huge role on the whole buying process. To understand your consumer means that you can create products that meeets the needs of your chosen demographics or create a desire of want that wasn't initially there.

In the first session of understanding the customer we looked briefly into perception; how people percieve things and the importance of the use of colours and imagery, and how this can effectively influences or initial thoughts and perceptions of what we see and understand.

Perception plays a huge part in customer psychology, how we percieve things is based on the the knowledge that we have gained via previous experiences for example when looking at first impressions we are judging and categorizing people on the basis of what they look like, how they dress, how they talk and even the way in which they enter a room.

We look at these characteristics and make a judgement on what we believe to be true by the knowledge that we have gained from other people who share similar characteristics and our assumptions of what we feel these people to be like. In society we are continuosly judging on our own perceptions good or bad whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

In all honesty I didn't think that I was a judgemental person at all but if you really think about it everyday we make assumptions however large or small, generally it takes no more than 12 seconds for us to make a judgement on a persons' personality and idologies.This session of Understanding the Customer was to get us into the habbit of analysing and explaining why we as consumers make these snap decisions.

The most interesting part of this lecture was when we completed the 'Egg' test which gave us an insight into the way in which others percieve us. This entailed each person drawing any shape of their choice on a balnk piece of paper, then writing or drawing the different points that relate to our everyday lives and personality such as favourite colour, favourite film, worst fear, religion, favourite acholocic drink etc.

The way in which someone expressed their answers through either text or images gave an insight into their personality for example if someone who had a phobia of snakes drew a picture of an large snake you may percieve this person to be of an extrovert nature however if this person had written snake in small inline text you may percieve this person to be a lot more shy and reserved.

This test effectively portrayed certain aspects of our personalities to a certain extent however although the results may have shown someone to be shy and reserved this person may argue that they are alot more out going but once they get to know you. This just certifies the old saying "don't judge a book by its cover".

Another form of how we percieve things is through colour association, this can have a huge impact on the way that we see and interpret things for example the colour red is most commonly associated with danger, passion, evil and lust thus almost immediately creating meaning for something.

Another activity that we took part in in class was with the comparison of two book covers, that had used different images and colours to portray the same title and author. Without knowing the names of the books and solely just by viewing the ways in which the colours and images had been used we were able to interpret the two books in completely different ways. This is an example of how influencial the use of colours and imagery are in customer psychology.