Perception acts as a lens through which you view reality. The way you experience a situation at any given moment depends on many factors: Your senses, past experiences, genetic predispositions, energy levels, and cognitive biases, to list a few.
In this article, you will learn how perception and reality are two separate entities with different meanings (and not the same thing, as many people believe). More importantly, you will see how marketers use this concept in the real world to persuade you.
✔️ Key Takeaways
- Perception is how you experience things, reality is how things actually are. It acts as a lens through which you view reality.
- Marketers operate in the gap between objective reality and subjective perception. They are capable of changing our perception of reality.
Your Perception Is Pâte, The Reality Is Dog Food
Imagine a friend invites you over for dinner and serves you five decorated plates of pâte-style meat. Each plate is garnished for your viewing pleasure, and served alongside a selection of crackers. All of them look delicious, and so you sample each one. At the end, the host asks you a number of questions, including, “Which one of the five plates do you think had the dog food?”1
This isn’t a made-up scenario, but a real experience from a research study titled, “Can People Distinguish Pâte from Dog Food?”2 The dog food was a mixture of canned turkey and chicken for puppies, and the four dishes used for comparison were duck liver mousse, pork liver pâte, liverwurst, and spam.
Each product was pulsed in a food processor to match the texture, chilled in a refrigerator to 4 degrees Celsius, and garnished with parsley to enhance presentation. A total of 18 test subjects were then instructed to taste the spreads, and rank the “tastiness” relative to each other on a scale of 1 (best, first place) to 5 (worst, last place).
After they tasted each sample, they were asked to guess which one the dog food was. Though the dog food ranked the worst in taste, none of the participants were able to distinguish the dog food from the pâte. Even when they were told that they ate dog food, they were not able to determine what plate they ate it from.
Related: Pricing Psychology Explained: Definition, Examples, and Strategies
The Eye Perceives Before the Mouth Tastes
Taste is more than what meets the tongue. Eating food is a multisensory experience: aroma picked up by your nose, textures exploding in the mouth, and a combination of flavors sitting on the plate. All five senses—smell, sight, hearing, touch, and taste—define how you perceive a meal, and whether you consider it to taste good.
“While the senses of taste, smell, and texture provide the ultimate arbiters of a food’s palatability, visuals make for a big part of our appreciation of food,” says Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Spence states that the visual aspects of a meal play the perhaps most important role in your relationship with food.
Part of the reason why food and sight are closely linked is because, when our ancestors were hunting and gathering in the wild, they first had to inspect the food to see if it was safe to eat. Our brain learned to enjoy seeing the food, since it would have to happen before we consume it.
Related: What is Big Data? How Do Online Companies Collect Your Data?
Your Perception Is Red Wine, The Reality Is White Wine
Skeptics might think that you can trick a layperson into eating anything, but that it is much more difficult to fool someone who consumes food and drinks for a living. Professional food tasters, for example, who can eat or drink something and categorize it according to its flavour profiles can’t be deceived. Or can the they?
The gap between sight and taste hasn’t just been observed with people eating dog food, but also with professional wine tasters.3 A similar experiment was done with a group of sommeliers, certified wine professionals who must go through years of tasting and drinking. They were asked to review two different glasses of wine: one red and one white.
What the sommeliers didn’t know was that the two glasses contained the same white wine, but that the appearance of one of the wines was changed with red food colouring. Despite the same information reaching the tongue, the sommeliers described the two wines to have completely different flavors. It doesn’t matter whether you are a layperson or a foodie; truth is, our experiences are shaped by the visuals that people put in front of you.
Related: Why Fear Sells and How it Affects Your Emotions
Your Perceptions Influence Your Reality
To some, the concept of perception and reality might not seem like a big deal. The appearance of food shouldn’t matter because, after all, the primary purpose of eating is to nourish yourself and stay alive. Cultural norms aside, what’s the difference between eating dog food and pâte, if both are safe to consume and provide you with the similar nutritional value? Similarly, why does it matter if a glass of red wine is just white wine with red food colouring?
The fact that our experiences can be changed is extremely valuable for people who promote and sell things. Marketers can change your experience of something by altering and tweaking aspects that correlate to your five senses. Your experience at a restaurant, for example, changes with how comfortable your seat is, the amount of light that falls on your table, or the type of background music that’s being played.
The bottom line is: marketers are skilled at changing your perception of reality. Though this might seem acceptable for any given situation, it becomes problematic when there is a large gap between what the product actually is, and what marketers portray it to be. Sometimes the appearance of something has been changed so much that it does not resemble what it actually is, and so you get a false perception.
References
- Johnson, Matt, and Prince Ghuman. Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains. BenBella Books, 2020, pp. 592-7.
- Bohannon, John, et al. “Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?” American Association of Wine Economists, vol. 23, no. 2, Apr. 2009, doi:10.1007/s00144-010-0022-1.
- Morrot, Gil, et al. “The Color of Odors.” Brain and Language, vol. 79, no. 2, Nov. 2001, pp. 309-20, doi:10.1006/brln.2001.2493.