Page 97 - DMGT506_CONSUMER_BEHAVIOUR

Consumer Behaviour

Notes someone to see whether his umbrella does a better job than the hood of my jacket out in
the rain, and unless I suspect that some charlatan is simply trying to squeeze a few bucks
out of me, I'm likely to trust what he broadcasts to his seven-hundred friends or group
members - so long as he's addressing my needs and making believable claims.
So as we can see, Facebook has taken huge strides in extending the word-of-mouth
phenomenon to the international community - and it all happens instantly. Every Facebook
user can easily publish his experience with your product, and if you're marketing to his
friends, you'd better hope he's got good things to say. Thinking about all the elements of
a purchasing experience that consumers are likely to share with others is an important
part of maintaining a good reputation for satisfying your customers.
Another thing it's done is to significantly change the landscape of product marketability.
Traditional means of marketing a product like radio and television broadcasting, newsprint
and billboards, mail circulars and "direct marketing" had an altogether different impact
on consumers back when they didn't have as many options in investigating products
online - you can be assured that any elements of your customers' experience with your
product, and with the process of purchasing it, will not only be under discussion
immediately, but also readily available to anyone else who takes the time to look around.
Take some time to look around Facebook for products and services similar to the one
you're promoting. What can your product deliver that the ones you see can't? Do you have
better ideas about the customer-interaction experience than the ones some dissatisfied
customers report? Look at what looks good on Facebook, and look at what looks bad.
What can you do to build a well-known and positive reputation on the world's biggest
growing social network?
There are lots of people and organizations out there who've made a lot of money by
successfully gaining a presence on Facebook. Hyper Facebook Traffic makes it their business
to provide you with the best, most comprehensive and effective instruction on using
Facebook's immense social marketing potential to really connect the right people with
your product.
Question
How feasible is it to promote brands and facilitate learning through social networking
sites like Facebook?
Source: http://hubpages.com/hub/Consumer-Learning-with-Facebook

6.5 Summary

Learning can be viewed as a relatively permanent change in behaviour occurring as a
result of experience. Behaviour has two aspects - observable behaviour as well as
non-observable cognitive activity.
Four components appear to be fundamental to almost all learning situations and include
motivation, cues, response and reinforcement.

There are two forms of conditioned learning - classical and instrumental. Classical
conditioning refers to the process of using an existent relationship between a stimulus and
response to bring about the learning of the same response to a different stimulus.

In instrumental conditioning, reinforcement plays a more important role than in classical
conditioning. There is no automatic stimulus - response relationship in this case, so the
subject must first be induced to engage in the desired behaviour and then this behaviour
must be reinforced.

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