Nothing is of a greater importance for a marketer than perception. How do consumers perceive the brand, the product, how do they perceive competitors - that all determines how successful the product will be on the market. The issue of selective perception has been the core of the marketing dogma: " Know your target market".
It has been said so many times that we stop seeing the reason behind that. That means we act with the selective attention. Knowing your target market implies that you are able to understand the way the message or product is perceived, what part of the message the target market will selectively retained and how will they act.
Lack of the understanding of that leads to the failure of products or ideas on the market. For example, the study by McClure and Ryans mentioned in "Consumer Behavior and the Study of Marketing" reports that the customer and retailer often perceive the product attributes of a major appliances differently. Retailers tend to put more importance to the price factor than customer. As a result retailers put less value than did consumers to service, warranties and ease of use.
Another example of the influence of selective perception in marketing is the department or grocery stores. When we enter the store with enormous variety of products, we do not necessarily see all of them. The ones that we really see and respond to are the ones that are somehow familiar to us because of famous brand, or memorable advertising. The selective perception starts working for us (or sometimes against us) at the time we enter the store. And companies try to influence selective perception by their advertising.