Chapter Overview

This chapter has outlined some of the major aspects of how and what consumers experience, learn, and know. There is much yet to discover, and many mysteries about the interplay between experience, learning, and knowledge are yet to be imagined. Emotions, culture, and context are fundamental to their fundamental nature and the interplay among them. Consumer experiences, learning and knowledge also contribute to meanings in ways this chapter has only touched on. In Chapter Eighteen, we will delve in depth into the construction of meaning from experiences and memories of experiences.

Consumer experiences are at the heart of consumer behavior, and many industry experts argue that economic value turns on offering memorable experiences, or better, transformational experiences. We provided a typology of consumer experiences and stressed that consumer experiences include anticipated consumption, purchase, consumption, and remembered consumption. Marketers need to understand how anticipated consumption relates to consumers aspirations and goals. In Chapter Seventeen, we will describe post-consumption experiences, and in Chapter Eighteen we will discuss further how consumption experiences create consumer meaning.

Learning , memory and knowledge are closely linked. We provided a view of consumer learning as adaptive and determined by value systems, desires, needs, and what the learning already knows. We can think of consumers as generating guesses or hypotheses about the way the world works, in order to make adaptive choices that move them towards their goals. We provided a simplified model of consumer learning based around consumer guesses and exposure to evidence. There are lots of different ways to learn. We talked about learning from experience and learning by description as two different ways. We briefly outlined two behavioral learning theories--classical conditioning and operant conditioning. These two approached have helped us discover useful techniques for stimulating learning.

Almost all consumer decisions include a memory component. Each time we say or remember something we put it together from bits and pieces stores separately in our brain. Memory is constructive and it is a culturally constructed, social activity. Memory is not like a computer, but we can think of it as occurring in three stages: input, storage, and output. Consumers have a variety of schemas and scripts that help them organize experiences. Memories can be distinguished in terms of short-term and long-term, and long-term memories can be further categorized as semantic or episodic. Semantic memories are what we generally think of as knowledge. One type of knowledge marketers are especially interested in is brand knowledge. We included a description of the types of associations consumers have about brands. We also summarized several different techniques marketers can use to influence memory.

Consumers are overwhelmed by information and choices. Memory related constraints have a strong impact in judgement and decision-making. Although these constraints may lead consumers to make less than optimal choices, they are also adaptive and many times help consumers feel good, and attain their goals. We described some common context effects, and some cognitive heuristics that consumers use to collect and use information and knowledge. On the horizon, we see the development of a variety of electronic agents or "knowbots" that will help consumers gather, store, and output relevant information.