How Consumer Attitude and Behavior Affect Their Purchases - Essay Example

? Section How Consumer Attitudes & Behaviors Affect their Purchases Consumers’ purchasing power is highlyinfluenced by their behavior, beliefs, and attitudes towards brands or stores. Attitude and belief can either act as an advantage or obstacle to a marketer. Choosing to ignore or discount consumers’ beliefs and attitudes on a product as a way of developing a sustainable marketing strategy would not guarantee an automatic success. In contrast, marketers of perceptive nature leverage their degree of attitudes understanding to help them predict consumer behavior. These savvy marketers understands their consumers’ behavior and thus able to distinguish between attitudes and beliefs. Every year, firms (through their marketing departments) heavily invest in researches to identify consumers’ attitudes which are more likely influence their purchasing behavior. Marketers go ahead to persuade consumers through promotions and advertising in order to win consumer loyalty. Consumer Attitudes In marketing, attitude is defined as “the general evaluation of a product or service formed over time” (Maxfield, 2012). Attitude greatly affects the purchasing and buying habit of consumers as well as satisfying personal motives of the consumers. As such, consumer attitude is defined as a composite of beliefs, behavioral intention and feelings. On the other hand, behavioral intention of consumers is defined (in marketing content) by consumers’ beliefs and feeling about a given product. Consumer feeling and behavior are treated together as they are relatively interdependent, thus collectively representing purchasing force of the consumer. This relationship and interdependency can be represented as below: Attitude is majorly a psychological term that applies in all fields involving human beings. Attitude refers to the inner feelings and understanding of individuals towards certain object or concepts. Attitude may be either negative or positive depending on the existing environmental factors triggering the feeling. Behavior on the other hand, refers to individuals’ reactions or actions towards certain environmental elements in response to the internal or external stimuli. Attitudes and behaviors of customers have almost similar effects on the buying trend of certain product. Attitudes exist in three main components that include cognitive, affective and behavior. Cognitive component of consumer attitude relates to the general consumer’s belief about a certain product. Affective component of the consumer attitude attributes to feelings and emotional response of customers towards particular objects. Behavior component on the other hand, entails learned tendency by consumer to react in particular manner towards particular activity or objects. In this way, the psychological effects that drive the understanding of consumer/rational choice are clearly understood and noted. Beliefs Belief is a fundamental component of consumer’s purchasing powers and influences. A consumer may either hold a positive or negative belief towards a product or a store. For instance, some consumers may belief that coffee tastes good while those with negative belief towards this product will say that it stains papers and is easily spilled. Though rare, some consumers have a neutral belief on a product (e.g. coffee is black). Other group of consumers may have an indifference belief about a commodity. Notably, the beliefs consumers carry on products have no to be accurate and at times may be very contradictory. Since consumers hold a number of beliefs towards the range of products, it is quite had to reach the ‘bottom line’ of such variations in beliefs. Brand equity and consumer attitude Brand equity is an important concept in building and developing marketing strategy. Brand equity is an indication of profitability index as perceived by marketers. However, brand equity depends on brand attitude. From consumers’ point of view, brand equity entails positive brand attitude founded on favorable beliefs and meanings which are easily activated and accessible by memory. Beliefs, meanings, and accessibility create favorable and strong consumer-brand-relationship, an important asset for a corporation. Brand equity is acquired in three ways: building, buying, or borrowing. Corporation builds brand equity in either by ensuring that the brand delivers positive consequences or by advertising positive consequences of the brand (Maxfield, 2012). Alternatively, companies may borrow brand equity. This is attainable through extending positive brand image or name to other commodities. Brand extension is essential in determining consumer attitude and purchasing power. Finally, marketers can build brand equity by borrowing from other firms or products with good image among the consumers. Celebrity Endorsements and Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) The ELM asserts that consumers will dissect claims in more important circumstances as opposed to unfavorable situations. According to ELM, elaboration for ‘unimportant’ products will be relatively low. However, products which are important or expensive, elaboration is more extensive with the endorser more likely to be ‘congruent’ with the product. The ABC Model of Attitudes This model is constituted by affect, behavior and cognition (ABC) which accentuates the strong relationship between feeling, doing, and knowing. Affect represents an individual’s feeling about an object. Affect therefore represents opinion or emotion regarding an object or brand. Cognition is the beliefs or knowledge a customer holds about an object. Behavior on the other hand, represents consumer response as a result of affect and cognition. The hierarchy of affect is results from the three attributes working collectively. The hierarchies of effect are low-involvement, experimental and standard-learning hierarchies (Olmsted, 2012). The high-involvement (standard-learning) hierarchy assumes that consumers conduct a comprehensive research and build strong beliefs regarding the attitude object. It is after this that consumers will establish feelings towards the attitude commodity or brand. Feelings are then followed by behavior. Thus, cognition-affect-behavior strategy is common in the purchasing choices made by individuals. The low-involvement hierarchy is established on “a cognition-behavior-affect” sequence of events. Consumers who use low-involvement hierarchy make their purchase decision on knowledge and not feeling. Such consumers develop feelings about an object after the purchases have been made. However, this restricted knowledge approach to affects is unsuitable for cars, real estates, and other life-changing items. The experimental hierarchy of affects is characterized by ‘affect-behavior-cognition processing’ ordering process. In this model, consumers are influenced to purchase a product or service based on their feelings towards the product or service. Cognition enforces the effects after purchase has been made. For example, emotional contagion which asserts that consumer purchase choice is highly influenced by advertisements. Social judgment theory provides another unpopular explanation for consumer attitude changes. According to this theory, consumers compare current information about a product to the previous notion before purchasing. The incoming information is then filtered to two possible paths; latitudes of rejection or latitudes of acceptance. In case there is no significance difference between the incoming and old information, then, consumers follow the path of latitude of acceptance. When the incoming information is disparate and inconsistent with the current one, consumers often chose the latitude of rejection. Consumers hold a number of feelings towards different objects or brands at their disposal. At times, consumer feelings are founded on their beliefs or these feelings may be independent consumer beliefs. Furthermore, consumer behavioral intention is all that the consumers plan to do with the objects or commodities before them. Similar to feelings, behavioral intentions are at times logical consequences of consumer beliefs which may reflect other circumstances. For instance, though a consumer may not like a restaurant, she/he will spend time in the restaurant within the company of friends. Likewise, consumers’ behavior and attitude can be quite inconsistent for a number of the following reasons: though consumers may love to acquire a given commodity, their willingness is not backed by the ability as they constrained by resources, the scale of preference or the prevalence of competing goods, social influences, and/or measurement problems that result due to the fact that it is oftentimes difficult to accurately measure and rank attitude (Hulbert, 2012). Attitude Change Strategies When consumers realize that marketers have self-serving interest in driving attitude change, they become reluctant to changing their attitudes. To achieve these self-driven attitudes, marketers need to focus on changing affects and beliefs of the consumers. Classical conditioning approach tries to match and pair the linked products with stimulus. Classical conditioning strategy of winning consumer attitude is highly dependent on the degree of exposure to the effects. For example, products which are highly advertised will general be strongly linked with consumers independent of consumer’s specific belief about the product. Changing behavior Since consumer behavior is rational, consumers will continue to consume the products which they have developed strong ties with unless they are switched. To get consumers switch to a different brand, marketers use coupons and temporary price discounts. Thus, availability of a product or brand is not a guarantee of effecting a net change on helping the customer to switch to the brand. As established, the switching cost is relatively expensive for the consumers; hence, they would prefer loyalty to their traditional brands rather than the unknown that such a change necessarily infers. Changing beliefs Attempting to change consumer beliefs is a critical step towards attitude change, especially when consumers hold inaccurate or unfavorable beliefs about a given brand. However, this difficult as consumers tend to resist changes to their long held beliefs. Likewise, consumers are more likely to accept new beliefs especially if the belief does not conflict their current beliefs (Peter, 2010). Though very difficult, attempting to change the currents beliefs held by consumers is a key strategy in achieving market dominance. New firms often succeed by changing ideals. However, this attempt is very risky to the marketers and the industry. This is of course one of the main reasons why firms face an uphill battle with regards to effecting a net change on consumer attitude once a negative impression has been made. For this purpose, firms generally abide by the belief that the avoidance of any type of negative impression is the best policy due to the fact that changing a customer’s beliefs is both costly and not a guaranteed way to change their minds. Appeal Approaches Using affect approach to induce empathy through advertising characters is likely to increase attraction for a product. However, if consumers believe that their feelings are target or being exploited, empathy inducement may backfire. Secondly, fear appeals may be successful if the marketers evoke optimal fear levels (just enough to scar consumers into action) or if ways of avoiding the feared stimulus are explicitly indicated. Finally, humor appeals are effective in drawing attention of the customers, but may fail to persuade customers. In this way, a firm may have a memorable and/or humorous approach that will engage the would-be customer but will not have the affect of generating sales. Conclusion Consumer attitude may be influenced by other external factors beyond product attributes. Cultural and social environment, demographic, geographical and psychographic conditions can shape consumer behavior. Companies engaging in direct marketing (based on current customers) uses look-alike modeling techniques to create response rates among the consumers. Consumer behavior, which is the study constituting consumer feelings, brand choices, and beliefs, is an essential tool in understanding attitude, beliefs, behavior and purchasing decisions of the consumers. Marketers should develop compelling but relative marketing messages using a combination of the above information to influence consumer behavior. Moreover, having favorable attitude towards a product does not necessarily imply consumption preference. Marketers therefore need to develop attitudinal models to assist them in gauging consumer attitude and consumption behavior. References Hulbert, M. (2012, November 28). A contrarian take on consumer confidence - MarketWatch. Featured Articles From The MarketWatch. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-11-28/commentary/35397741_1_consumer-confidence-contrarian-indicator-stock-market Maxfield, J. (2012, December 4). What's Driving Stocks Today? Financial Times.com: Stock Investing Advice | Stock Research. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://www.financialtimes.com/investing/general/2012/12/04/whats-driving-stocks-today.aspx Olmsted, N. (2012, November 27). Headline Story | equities.com. equities.com | Global Financial Network. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://www.equities.com/news/headline-story?dt=2012-11-27&val=758815&cat=business Peter, J. (2010). Consumer behavior & marketing strategy. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Read More