How Marketing Tactics Influence Customer Perception?
Do you aggressively integrate customers’ perceptions into your marketing strategy? With the growing rivalry, entrepreneurs must create stimuli that will positively affect how consumers view their products and services. This approach can be your brand’s hallmark of sustainability.
Your goal is to ensure that consumers are inclined to your offer. How they view it will fuel their excitement to react positively or negatively, either enhancing your business performance or undermining it.
In a nutshell, let us review how marketing tactics can influence customers’ perceptions.
What is Customer Perception?
Customer perception relates to the attitude a customer has towards your goods or services. This action will determine the choices they make regarding your offer. For instance, you might be advertising a product that was doing well, but now you have made changes to the packaging. If customers cannot connect with your new package, they can walk away. Due to their perception, they have created an image that impacts their feelings about what is inside the package. You can also lose them to your rival if consumers are biased towards your brand image.
How Can Marketing Tactics Influence Customer Perception?
Research suggests that different people may connect divergent meanings to the same marketing stimulus. People respond differently for various reasons, such as their environment or experience, motivation, levels of involvement, and the senses. But not all customers will behave identically to your advertisement. Further research shows that the more they interact, the more receptive they will be to your marketing stimuli.
Therefore, for entrepreneurs to be competitive in shaping perception, they should first consider market segmentation to sustain their entire strategy. That will enable different appeals to different segments of customers. It will also ensure your triggers are distinct and communicate the right message so that consumers can engage with your brand’s communication piece.
When marketing strategies are applied that strategically influence perception, such as competitive pricing, you will have tremendous potential to attract your ideal customers, increase sales, and grow revenue. For example, “McDonald’s says improvements in consumer perceptions of the brand have helped it post its best sales figures in six years. Sales were up 5.5% year on year in the fourth quarter, marking its 10th consecutive quarter of growth. And full-year sales were up 0.3% – the company’s best performance in six years,” as revealed by Marketing Week.
How Do Customers’ Respond to Marketing Stimuli?
Marketing stimuli are “Factors orchestrated by marketers that influence people’s consumption choices,” according to IGI Global. Thus, marketers can leverage the perceptions of customers by influencing their decisions to buy their products. Consumers respond to marketing stimuli in many ways. As entrepreneurs, let us quickly look at one of those ways — Attention.
The attention stage is an influential part of the customers’ response. According to studies, there are three key characteristics of attention which affect consumers’ response to marketing stimuli.
- Limited attention—When there are numerous marketplace stimuli, consumers will cognitively perceive the stimuli depending on their ability, but they will not be able to respond to all present.
- Selective attention—This soothes consumers from being overwhelmed. Since attention is minimal, they may be selective in how they direct their attention in their choices.
- Divided attention—While customers can divide their attention, apportioning their interest to different options may trigger confusion. This can result in less attention to the communication piece.
How to Gain Attention?
To stay ahead of the competition, entrepreneurs must ensure that they capture the interest of customers. You could adopt three simple methods to get their attention.
- Create surprising stimuli. How do you react when you are surprised by a gift? You are eager to open it to see what is inside, right? When you surprise your customer, it will also stir enthusiasm and inspire them.
- Create pleasant stimuli. Incite real feelings about your brand, products, or services. Embed humor, for example, into your message.
- Create an easy to process stimuli. Please do not overload your customers with information; otherwise, it will be challenging for them to process. The more concrete your stimuli are, the easier it will be to process.
Another essential element of consumer perception when it comes to getting customers to pay attention to your advertising is exposure.
You can increase your ad spending astronomically to increase the exposure. Still, consumers can align themselves selectively with what matters to them. For instance, research shows that “Nike has the highest consumer perception. Nike’s score is nearly three times higher among US teens. Vans, Jordan, Adidas and Converse round out the top five apparel and footwear brands among US teens.”
Entrepreneurs can prevent selective exposure by preventing hard-selling advertisements or to promote involuntary interest, among other ways. Also, selective exposures diminish the impact of advertising expenditures by filtering information.
Getting a detailed understanding of how customers respond, even when the level of attention is nominal, can encourage you to engage with their feelings proactively. That can help you to build loyal fans and grow your brand.
Conclusion
The perception of customers is central to a brand’s marketing tactics. Entrepreneurs must cater to their feelings to receive positive responses as they interpret the information through marketing stimuli. Captivating their attention and addressing their needs and expectations through effective marketing tactics can result in strong business growth.
So, are the marketing tactics for your brand positioned to influence your customers’ perceptions? If not, are you ready to learn more?
Let us take a look at how you can further manage customer perception.
Please share your comments.