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.

Music playing