Heuristics and Print Advertising Essay Example

Essays on Heuristics and Print Advertising Essay The paper â€Å"Heuristics and Print Advertising† is a   thrilling version of an essay on marketing. Marketing may be defined as - the process by which products and services are introduced to the marketplace. Furthermore, it highlights every characteristic of the firm and product. As a result, research in marketing has to have an overall approach so that the marketers can understand the entire trend and make the consumers realize that this is the right choice (Nelson 1974).The essential concept: Traditional economic approaches that assume that people make decisions by trading off all features of all alternatives to maximize utility are wrong. Instead, people use simplifying heuristics to get through complex decision making. For example, people naturally classify alternatives into categories and then eliminate broad sets of alternatives (Dzyabura Hauser 2010). They consider alternatives in succession and take the first one that meets their needs (a process of what Nobelist H erbert Simon called "satisficing" strategies).People find reference points to help simplify decision making (Midgley 1977). Store brands appear to be good buys because they sit on a shelf next to national brands at much lower prices (Hauser 2011). And shoppers tend to navigate a store a certain way. When faced with unfamiliar alternatives, they gravitate to the familiar as a safer starting point. Imagine: You're sick to your stomach in a foreign country. You go to a local pharmacy and what do you find: row after row of unfamiliar brands in unfamiliar packages. You panic. But if you spot one brand that you do recognize, you're likely to buy it — even though it's a product you've rarely used before. Familiarity relaxes the risk/fear response and leads to a simplified choice.Behavioral economics is shining a light on the power of simplicity. Books such as Predictably Irrational — Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (2009) and How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer (2009) have topped best-seller lists. And, although simplifying heuristics might seem irrational, they may be globally optimal when we consider that people successfully make thousands of decisions on an average day. In fact, our brains would explode if we were to consider becoming calculative utility-maximizers with respect to each of these choices.An anthropologist might explore the need for Heuristics by observing the ritualized ways in which a person's day unfolds. And it's true: We all have recurring patterns for how we get going in the morning, what happens when we first arrive at work, and what happens once we return home at the end of a day (Hauser 2011). Yet each of our personal patterns is quite different from those of anyone else. In other words, we have a multitude of choices, but we each fall into our own pattern and choose our own simplified, recurring way of navigating a day. And the habits can be as basic as watching television.In a given week, on average, viewers wa tch only 10 percent of the channels available to them. How do they get to those selections? By ritual. For example, a viewer who always start on the same channel and then click on to the onscreen guide. It's a simplifying pattern that starts off my evening entertainment, and we all have to simplify patterns for just about everything we do.