MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Marketing Communications



Marketing Communications

Question 1

 

Evoked Set

 In the 1960's, John A. Howard, the Columbia University marketing scholar who past away in 1999, evolved the idea of the "evoked set" to describe this process of selection. Shoppers start not with every single brand they are dimly aware of but with a assembly of options -- the evoked set -- uppermost in their minds. "An evoked set consists of the brands in a merchandise category that the consumer remembers at the time of decision making," according to "Marketing: Best Practices," a textbook revised by K. Douglas Hoffman. (An alternative period, "consideration set," is sometimes used for the same notion and sometimes for the smaller set of choices that remain after consumers eliminate unacceptable options from the evoked set.)

Ask a food shop shopper to name toothpaste brands, for instance, and you'll probably hear "Crest and Colgate." Only when pressed to name others will the shopper arrive up with, say, Rembrandt and Mentadent. Crest and Colgate are the evoked set, the one from which most shoppers will choose to purchase -- especially if they aren't looking at snappy merchandise displays for other brands.

 Decision makers start with an evoked set of possibilities -- the persons who immediately spring to mind. Who makes it into that evoked set depends in part on how persons are categorized on the mind's "grocery shelf."

Last summer, for instance, The New York Times ran an article on Hollywood's search for juvenile action heroes. Old standbys like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford were getting a bit long in the tooth, premier studios to turn to newcomers like Matt Damon and Vin Diesel. The part left the impression of a vast generation gap, with no heroes from the latter half of the baby boom.

But one gigantic action star was inconspicuously absent: Wesley Snipes, born in 1962. Another, Will Smith, born in 1968, was cited only in passing. The evoked set of "action stars" didn't overlap with the evoked set of "black video stars." There was no racial hostility at work, just the bounds of human minds and the categories they create.

Overcoming those limits is the argument for a certain kind of affirmative action -- not quotas or preferences, but an active effort to select from the full range of possible candidates, not only the first evoked set. (This analysis does not apply easily to cases like school admissions, where the selection is made from a large pool of persons who actively present themselves for consideration.)

 

Buying Centre (Decision Making Unit)

A buying center (also renowned as a decision making unit or DMU), in marketing, procurement, and organizational studies, is a assembly of employees, family members, or members of any kind of organization responsible for finalizing major decisions, usually engaging a purchase. In a business setting, major purchases typically need input from various parts of the organization, encompassing finance, accounting, purchasing, information expertise management, and senior management. Highly technical purchases, such as information systems or output gear, also need the expertise of technical ...