Consumer Behavior: Sensory Marketing and the Metaverse

Consumer Behavior and Brand Relationships

Consumer Behavior (CB) is the study of the processes involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires and to define and express their identities. It is an ongoing process and an exchange.

Role Theory in Consumer-Brand Relationships

Much of consumer behavior resembles actions in a play. Key attachments include:

• Self-concept attachment: The product helps to establish the user's identity.
• Nostalgic attachment: The product serves as a link with a past self.
• Interdependence: The product is a part of the user's daily routine.
• Love: The product elicits emotional bonds of warmth, passion, or other strong feelings.

Consumers, Society, and Technology

The market is a moving target influenced by several digital factors:

• Social Media: The Horizontal Revolution.
• Artificial Intelligence and The Metaverse: Incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, AI, Big Data, and the rise of the Digital Native.

The Metaverse

The Metaverse exists in the physical world, but it also involves immersive environments using virtual-reality or augmented-reality technology. It is "always on" and operates in real-time. It is built on a virtual economy—often based upon cryptocurrency and digital goods and assets.

Sensation and Perception

Sensation is the immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers, skin) to basic stimuli such as light, color, sound, and texture. Perception is the process by which sensations are selected, organized, and interpreted.

Sensory Marketing

Sensory marketing involves thinking carefully about the impact of sensations on our experiences with products.

• Vision: Many of our reactions to color come from learned associations. Marketers communicate meaning on a visual channel using a product’s color, size, and styling (including illuminance, shape, and location).
• Scent: Like color, odor can stir emotions and memory. Scent marketing is a form of sensory marketing seen in products like lingerie and detergents, and used by testers, second-hand car dealers, and luxury underwear brands.
• Sound: This includes sound symbolism and audio watermarking.
• Touch: Key concepts include the endowment effect, psychological ownership, the contamination effect, and Kansei engineering.
• Taste: Taste receptors contribute to our experience of many products. This field includes Gastrophysics. Changes in culture also determine the tastes we find desirable, often leading to hedonic escalation.

Technological Integration and Sensory Stages

Augmented Reality (AR)

AR refers to media that superimpose one or more digital layers of data, images, or video over a physical object.

Stage 1: Exposure

Exposure occurs when a stimulus comes within the range of someone’s sensory receptors. Key concepts include:

• Sensory threshold and Psychophysics.
• Absolute threshold.
• Differential threshold.
• JND (Just Noticeable Difference): The minimum change in a stimulus that can be detected.
• Shrinkflation: Most firms prefer to reduce the size of the package instead of increasing the price.

Stage 2: Attention

Attention is the extent to which processing activity is devoted to a particular stimulus. Consumers often experience sensory overload, where they are exposed to more information than they can process. This has led to the rise of the eyeball economy and the phenomenon of brain drain.