Attitude

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Attitude attitude change
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Attitudes

• How do marketers get consumers to form a certain
  attitude towards their product?
• How do marketers change consumers attitudes
  towards products/brands?

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Lecture overview

• What is an attitude?
• What are the components of attitude?
• How do marketers change consumers attitudes?
• Advertising and attitudinal change
• Market segmentation and product-development
  strategies based on attitudes

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Consumer behaviour model
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Attitudes

• An enduring combination of motivational,
  emotional, perceptual and cognitive processes
  with respect to some aspect of our environment
  (Krech and Crutchfield, 1984)
• Learned predisposition to respond in a
  consistently favourable or unfavourable manner
  with respect to a given object (Fishbein and
  Ajzen, 1975)

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Attitudes

• Favourability
• Positive to negative
• Intensity
• Strong to weak
• Confidence
• Total confidence to minimal/no confidence

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How are attitudes formed

• Classical conditioning
• Stimulus generalisation
• Stimulus discrimination
• Operant conditioning
• Cognitive learning theory

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What are the sources of attitudes?

• Experience
• Early experience
• Family influence
• Knowledge
• What we know
• What we have seen/heard

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Are attitude and behaviour linked?

• Attitudes influence, and are influenced by,
  lifestyle
• Both the source of, and result of behaviour

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Components of attitude
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Cognitive component

• Consists of consumers beliefs and knowledge
• For most attitude objects consumers hold a number
  of beliefs
• Each of these beliefs reflects knowledge about an
  attribute of the product/brand
• The total configuration of beliefs makes up the
  cognitive component of the product/brand
• Many beliefs are evaluative in nature

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Measuring consumers beliefs about attributes and
brands

• Multi-attribute models (eg. Fishbein)
• Used widely by market researchers to measure the
  beliefs that consumers have about different
  attributes of a product or a service

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Multi-attribute models

• Marketers can
• Identify the major attributes of a product, and
  the weightings (or relative importance) of each
• Ask consumers to evaluate the product on each
  attribute (using a semantic differential scale)
• Add up the consumers ratings on each attribute
  (factoring in the various weightings) to achieve
  an overall attitude (score) towards the product

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Affective component

• Feelings or emotional reactions to an object
• May be a vague global feeling to the product,
  or be based on evaluation of specific attributes
• Most beliefs have associated affective reactions
  or evaluations
• Beliefs are subject to situational influences
• Individual beliefs may be evaluated differently
  by different individuals, but some beliefs seem
  to be consistent within cultures

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Behavioural component

• Tendency of attitude holder to respond in a
  certain manner to an object or activity
• Behavoural component provides reponse tendencies
  or behavioural intentions
• Actual behaviours reflect these intentions
• Generally directed towards an entire object (to
  buy or not to buy)

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Component consistency
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Explaining inconsistency

• 1. Consumers dont have need or motive to
  purchase
• 2. Consumer may not have ability to purchase
• 3. Consumers may make trade-offs
• 4. Weakly held cognitive/affective components may
  change
• 5. Other individuals may be involved in purchase
  decision
• 6. The purchase situation may have an impact
• 7. Its difficult to measure all aspects of
  attitude

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Attitude change strategies

• Marketers attempt to change consumers attitudes
  all the time
• Changing the affective component of an attitude
• Changing the behavioural component
• Changing the cognitive component

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Changing the affective component

• Increase consumers liking of a brand without
  directly influencing beliefs or behaviour
• Increased liking leads to more positive beliefs
  leads to purchase behaviour (when the need
  arises)
• Classical conditioning
• Affect toward the advertisement
• exposure

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Advertising can change liking

• Affect-based advertising campaigns may not need
  to contain cognitive (factual or attribute)
  information
• Classical conditioning principles should guide
  such campaigns
• Attitudes towards the advertisement itself are
  critical
• Repetition is critical for affect-based campaigns

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Attitude-change Strategy Focusing on Affect
Increased affective response (liking) towards prod
uct
Overall attitude change
Increased positive beliefs
Behaviour (purchase)
Positive marketing stimuli (advertisement, packag
e)
Behaviour (purchase)
Increased positive beliefs
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Changing the behavioural component

• Behaviour can lead to affect, to cognition, or
  both simultaneously
• Strategies to change behaviour are based on
  operant conditioning
• Inducing consumers to purchase/consume behaviour,
  make it rewarding, so lead to repurchase
  behaviour
• Coupons, free samples, POP displays, price
  reductions etc.

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Attitude-change Strategy Focusing on Behaviour
Overall attitude change
Marketing or situational stimuli (free
sample, guests)
Behaviour (purchase, consumption)
Increased affect (liking)
Increased positive beliefs
Increased positive beliefs
Increased affect (liking)
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Changing cognitive component

• Change the beliefs about the attributes of the
  brand
• Change the relative importance of these beliefs
• Add new beliefs
• Change the beliefs about the attributes of the
  ideal brand

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Attitude-change strategy focusing on cognitions
Overall attitude change
Marketing stimuli (advertisement, package)
Cognitions (beliefs)
Increased affect (liking)
Behaviour (purchase)
Behaviour (purchase)
Increased affect (liking)
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Individual situational characteristics
attitudinal change

• Individuals vary in their propensity to change
  attitudes
• Personality
• Strength of the held attitude

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Advertising and attitudinal change

• Source characteristics
• Appeal characteristics
• Message-structure characteristics

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Influencing characteristics

• Source characteristics
• Source credibility
• Trustworthiness and expertise
• Celebrity sources
• Increasing attentiveness, credibility, modelling,
  conditioning

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Matching endorser with product and target audience
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Influencing characteristics

• Appeal characteristics
• Fear appeals
• Humorous appeals
• Comparative appeals

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Guidelines for comparative advertising

• Guidelines for comparative advertising
• Best for promoting new brands
• Claims should be substantiated by credible
  sources
• Can be used to establish brands position, or to
  upgrade image by association
• Audience characteristics are important
• May be effective when non-comparative advertising
  has become ineffective
• Print media appears to be best vehicle

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Influencing characteristics

• Emotional appeals
• Designed to evoke strong feelings
• To elicit a positive affective response, rather
  than provide information or arguments
• Emotional appeals may work by
• Increasing maintaining viewers attention
• Increasing level of mental processing
• Improving memorabiltiy
• Increasing liking through classical conditioning
  or high-involvement processes

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Advertising and attitudinal change

• Message structure characteristics
• One-sided versus two-sided messages
• Two-sided messages may be more effective in
  changing strongly held attitudes
• More effective with highly educated consumers
• One-sided messages are best for reinforcing
  existing attitudes
• Non-verbal components
• Pictures, music, other non-verbal cues are all
  effective

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Marketing applications

• Market segmentation based on attitudes
• Properly designed marketing programs should be
  built around unique needs of each segment
• Understanding the importance consumers place on
  various attributes is key to benefit segmentation

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Marketing applications

• Product development
• Understanding consumers beliefs about ideal
  levels of performance can inform product
  development

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Summary

• Attitudes are the way consumers think, feel and
  act about some aspect of the envionment
• They are a result of knowledge and/or experience
  and they influence, and are influenced by,
  consumers lifestyles
• Attitudes have cognitive, affective and
  behavioural components

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Summary (cont)

• Marketers are principally concerned with
  developing and changing attitudes
• Attitude-change strategies focus on the
  cognitive, affective and behavioural components
• Advertising has a special place in attitudinal
  change
• Source characteristics
• Message structure characteristics

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Summary (cont.)

• Marketers use their knowledge of attitudes to
  undertake benefit segmentation and product
  development

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Overview