On Monday, April 29, 2019, Caroline CUNY, a marketing specialist atthe Institute for Research in Management and Economics (IREGE) at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB), will defend her habilitation thesis on her research titled “Understanding Consumer Behavior from the Perspective of Embodied and Situated Cognition: Contributions of the Act-In Model.”
The defense will take place at 2:30 p.m. in Room 103 at IREGE, located in the IAE Savoie Mont Blanc building on the Annecy campus.
SUMMARY
The research presented here investigates the effects of interactions between perceptual and memory processes on marketing variables (satisfaction, preference, choice) based on the theoretical framework of the single, multidimensional, and situated model of memory (Act-In, Versace et al., 2014). It explores how different sensory perception processes can influence how consumers perceive the marketing stimuli directed at them, as well as how experience arises in response to these stimuli and which psychological mechanisms are at work at the precise moment they are stimulated, when they recall, and when they act. The research helps demonstrate that memory representations reactivated by a product’s characteristics and the consumer’s evaluation of it, and those activated by the perception of the product itself, interact in such a way that the final evaluation of the product does not correspond to a simple superposition of perceptual effects, but rather to specific combined perception-memory effects. In this sense, perception is holistic, contextual, embodied in the senses, and influenced very early on by consumers’ prior experience with products.