Chapter 2: Customer Information Processing and Decision-making in CTEs

Charmed worlds are ones in which customers will commonly interact with IoT/IoE/VR/AR/MR/AI. Marketing in such a world requires us to have an appropriate model of customer information processing and decision-making with which to sharpen our understanding of marketing possibilities and probabilities.

In such worlds, customers will interact with systems that will provide them with stimuli involving all their senses; exhibit empathy; may surround them with unconventional or phantasmagorical environments; may allow them to exhibit self-will in creating phantasmagorical entities, events, and processes; and may appear magical. The interfaces of interaction may themselves be novel.

In this chapter, we will sketch out a model of customer behavior for the charmed world that is based on the literatures in psychology and neuroscience, and affective computing. The model will enable, we believe, a strategic understanding of customer behavior. The model will permit us, in a later chapter, to explore and consider significant implications and questions for marketing management. A major goal of marketing management is to improve and move the probability of preference toward a product (a good or service) so as to make the choice of the product as close to certain as possible. This purpose implies that we are interested in a model of a customer's anticipation and future action.