We spent quite a bit of time talking about behavioral learning theories. And emphasizing how often these very simple associations really make a difference in terms of how your customers, think about your products, your package designs, your logos, and all the other things that you use to make your product stand out. But I certainly don't want to give you the impression that we learn about everything in such a simple way. Because obviously, many of the connections that we make many of the thoughts that we have about products are much more complicated than that. So in addition to simple learning processes, I want to emphasize that customers also learn about what you sell, by observing how others react to your products. And that's why we need to also spend a few minutes talking about cognitive learning theory unlike behavior, Role theories of learning.

Cognitive learning theory approaches stress the importance of internal mental processes. So in other words, we're going beyond that black box that we talked about in the earlier session. Instead, this perspective views people as problem solvers, who actively use information from the world around them to master their environments. So one of the important components of cognitive learning is called observational learning and observational learning occurs when we watch the actions of others, and note the reinforcements that they receive for their behaviors. This is important because it means we don't have to directly experience reinforcements in order to learn from them. In contrast, a lot of times we engage in a process that psychologists call modeling.

Now, this kind of modeling has nothing to do with walking down a runway. It refers to the process of imitating the behavior of others. And so you can imagine that there are many, many situations in marketing contexts where modeling is extremely important. In some cases, it can be as simple as just observing someone else receive a compliment about something that they're using or wearing. We learn not because we directly receive a compliment, but because we observe what happens to other people when they publicly display a product. So the takeaway here is pretty simple.

You don't necessarily have to directly reward or punish consumers when they purchase from you. In some cases, you can just show what happens to desirable models who use or don't use your products.