Assignment: Mental processes are those which help consumers remember and include repetition, dual coding, meaningful encoding, and chunking. Chunking is defined as “a process of grouping stimuli by meaning so that multiple stimuli can become a single memory unit” (Babin & Harris, 2015, p. 83). A good example is Stanley Steamer. Another great example is Green Giant vegetables; the giant, the fields of giant vegetables, little sprout, and the “Ho, ho, ho… Green Giant (four “chunks” of information).

For this assignment, look for marketing messages in either a print advertisement or a television commercial. Find one that you believe illustrates a successful way in which to get consumers to chunk information for better recall later. Write a paper describing the message you chose and explain why you think it represents chunking.

Information Chunking in Marketing

Introduction 

Chunking of information is necessary for a recall when the intended information is utilized to make purchasing decision while shopping. Advertisers use chunking strategy when they try to make groups of certain stimuli so that a memory chunk can be produced Babin & Harris (2013). When information chunking is performed, the information is given a special status in the human memory and they can easily recall it when needed. For example if I see a bolded text somewhere with a message to buy a pen, when I go to a stationary shop, I would recall that information unconsciously and make a decision to buy that specific pen.

Chunking can be done with the help of electronic and print advertising means. Many advertising agencies use chunking as a form of advertising their products.

Chunking Example

Over here I would like to explain one of the chunking strategy that has been utilized by many advertisers when they want the consumers to remember their telephone number. This is done for making visual chunks of information for a better remembrance. An example of chunking can be viewed in the following image. The image has been copied from http://www.usefulusability.com/ website.

The image is an example of organizing a telephone number so that it can be remembered more easily than if it was not managed in such a manner. To experiment I would like the reader of this paper to look at the non-chunked telephone number and try and remember it. I know it is not easy to do so, even the number is already in some sort of chunks in which same digits are placed near each other or are in a chronological sequence. I mean 555 is in itself a chunk, 12 and 12 are other two chunks. But what the issue here is that fact that these chunks have not been separated with parenthesis. So the visual chunking is incomplete.

Now let’s experiment remembering the same information from the part where is says “chunking”. For me it was easy to remember it now. What has been done is the part of information that is not in a sequence or in some kind of chunk has been chunked with parenthesis. It makes it easy now to remember 512 as a separate chunk.

Parenthesis is not the only way to chunk information. The same can be done with bolding different information in chunks. Like we can write the telephone number as 151255512. Or also underlining can be used to chunk information like 151255512. But both these strategies would not be beneficial when applying chunking strategy to a telephone number as I think that parenthesis are the traditional way to separate the different parts of a telephone number and is more easily remembered.

Conclusion

Chunking is an efficient way to get the consumers remember intended information. I think that marketers should not just jump into chunking information in weird ways to try and impress the consumers. They have to look at the product they are advertising and then look at what chunking strategy should be applied for better results.

References

Babin, B. & Harris, E. (2013). CB5. Mason, Ohio: South-Western.