Download Arnould

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Chapter
13
Attitude Models and
Consumer Decision-Making
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Learning Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the difference between consumer cognitions, affect,
and behavior and describe their role in decision making.
 Discuss theories that are applied to attitudes and attitude
formation, and describe the role of attitudes in consumer
behavior.
 Talk about competing hierarchy of effects models, as they
relate to attitude formation.
 Distinguish between awareness, knowledge, liking, preference,
behavioral intentions, and behavior in consumer decision
making.

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Learning Objectives (continued)
Describe the influence involvement in consumer choice.
 Explain the concept of quick choices and the difference
between the central and the peripheral routes to persuasion.
 Outline the strengths and weaknesses of the Fishbein models
of attitudes.
 Describe other choice models, including expected utility
theory, satisficing decisions, consumer heuristics, and
prospect theory.

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Overview
Consumers make many choices every day.
 Some brand choices consumers make are relatively simple;
in other situations, consumers make brand choices that
require extensive information search and difficult choices.
 The chapter discusses two broad approaches for thinking
about the choices consumers make—consumer attitudes
and attitude models—and understanding how individual
consumers make decisions.
 Attitudes are key internal factors that shape individual
consumer choices.

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Consumer Attitudes and Attitude
Models
 Attitude
a
way to summarize consumers thoughts,
feelings, and actions.
 Attitude models
 provide a description of how consumer
information processing, including cognitions
and emotions, influence consumer choice
processes.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attitudes
Attitudes reflect what consumers think and feel and can be
used to explain what consumers intend to do.
 Attitude models help to describe how consumers make
choices.
 Attitude is a consumer’s overall, enduring evaluation of a
concept or object, such as a person, a brand, a service.
 Attitudes are a product of information acquisition—learned
beliefs, feelings and reaction tendencies.


Beliefs are thoughts linking an object to some feature or
characteristic.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why are Attitudes Formed?
The functional theory of attitudes explains the role of
attitudes in guiding and shaping social behavior and
describes where attitudes come from by understanding the
human motivation for forming attitudes.
 Four major functions of attitudes include utilitarian, valueexpressive, ego defensive, and knowledge.





Utilitarian function is based on rewards and punishments.
Value-expressive function refers to a consumer’s central values or
self-concept.
Ego-defensive function serves to protect the person from threats or
internal feelings of threat.
Knowledge function refers to the need for order, meaning, and
structure.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cognition, Affect, and Behavior
 Cognition

the beliefs a consumer has about an attitude object
 Affect

the way a consumer feels about an attitude object
 Behavior

the person’s intentions to do something with regard
to an attitude object
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Exhibit 13.1
Three Hierarchy of Effects Models
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Standard Hierarchy
 emphasizes
a problem-solving process
 order of consumer responses:

cognition, affect, then behavior (learn-feel-do)
 components of cognition: awareness and
knowledge
 components of affect: liking and preference
 behavior: intention to buy and actual behavior
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Low-Involvement Hierarchy
 applies
to low-involvement purchase situations
were both motivation and received risk are low
 order of consumer responses:
cognition, behavior, then affect (learn-do-feel)
 most common when the product is inexpensive
 Quick-Choice Model



No role for emotion or affect
Impulse purchases
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Exhibit 13.2
Quick-Choice Model
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Experiential Hierarchy
 stresses
the importance of consumers’ emotions
 applies to situations in which consumer are
often highly involved in decision making
 order of consumer responses:

Behavior, affect, then cognition (do-feel-learn)
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attitude toward the Ad
and Attitude toward the Store
Attitudes toward the ad are defined as a predisposition to
respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular
advertising stimulus during a particular exposure occasion.
 Positive feelings are generated by an ad and consumers
experience a variety of emotional responses when they are
exposed to ads.
 Determinants of attitudes toward the ad include attitude
toward the advertiser, evaluation of the ad execution itself,
the mood evoked by the ad, and the degree to which the ad
affects viewers’ arousal levels.
 Similarly, consumers can also have attitudes toward the
stores that they visit.

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
How Attitudes are Formed and
Learned

Attitudes are formed through one of three related processes
 Compliance



Identification



Related to operant conditioning
Attitudes are formed to gain reward or avoid punishment
Related to operant conditioning
Attitudes are formed so as to allow the person to fit in or to be
similar to others
Internalization



More complex than mere conditioning
Attitudes become part of a person’s value system
Attitudes are strongly held and difficult to change
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Consistency and Cognitive
Dissonance

Cognitive consistency


Cognitive dissonance


results when there is a discrepancy between behavior and attitude.
Self-perception theory


consumers strive to maintain harmony between their thoughts and
behaviors.
people observe their own behavior and use these observations to
shape their own attitudes.
Social judgment theory

people understand the world by matching up new stimuli with
information that is already stored in memory.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Consistency and Cognitive
Dissonance
 Balance




theory
describes how consumers evaluate elements that belong
together.
consumer perceptions are classified as either positive or
negative.
perceptions are altered to make them consistent.
Element triad:
 a consumer and her perceptions
 an attitude object
 some other person
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Exhibit 13.3
Balance Theory and Attitude Change
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
MultiAttribute Attitude Models
 MultiAttribute Attitude
Models:
consumers’ attitudes about brands depend on the beliefs
they have about a group of brand attributes.
 Three important elements:




attributes, characteristics of the attitude object
beliefs, cognition about the specific object
importance weights, reflecting the priority consumers
place on the object.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Basic Fishbein Model
 The

The model measures:





Basic Fishbein Model of Consumer Choice:
salient beliefs
object-attitude linkages
evaluations of each of the important attributes.
Attitudes are a sum of beliefs and their evaluations.
Strategic applications:



promotions
communications
influencing competitors’ belief ratings
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Extended Fishbein Model
The Extended Fishbein Model is called the theory of
reasoned action.
 Behavioral intention can be predicted from knowledge of
consumers’ attitudes, social beliefs, and personal beliefs.
 Behavior is predicted from knowledge of behavioral
intentions and the judged influence of extraneous events.
 The model attempts to take into account the strong influence
that other people can have on a person’s behavior.



Social normative beliefs attempt to capture expectations of others
Motivation to comply reflects how strongly a person feels that he
must comply with the wishes of others
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
 The
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of
Persuasion:



Persuasion refers to an active attempt to change individual
attitudes.
The ELM has been proposed to explain how persuasion
works
The ELM describes how individual consumers process new
information via different routes, depending on the personal
relevance of the information
 message-processing involvement (high or low)
 argument strength (strong or weak)
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Exhibit 13.4 Elaboration Likelihood
Model of Persuasion
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
How Consumers Respond to
Persuasion Attempts
 The

Persuasion Knowledge Model:
consumers develop knowledge about persuasion and
use this knowledge to respond to persuasion
experiences.
 Predicting

Consumer Behavior:
attitudes are predictive of behavior intentions.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Choice Models:
Expected Utility Theory

Expected Utility Theory


consumers make choices in a manner that maximizes a utility
function, subject to the constraints of time, money income,
information and technology.
Utility functions
 utility refers to the amount of happiness that a consumer
derives from a product or from a product attribute.
 Conjoint analysis:

one way is to ask consumers to rank order a series of brands,
all in the same product category.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Choice Models:
Constructive Choice Processes

Constructive Choice Processes



Consumers construct the most reasonably complex or novel
choices as situations demand
Consumers use constructive processes because they bring
multiple goals to consumer decisions
Compensatory models
 consumers assess the importance of each brand or
product attribute and assign a subjective value to each
attribute level. Then, consumers consider the alternatives
multiplying each attribute’s subjective value times its
importance weight and adding across these sums to
obtain an overall value for each brand or product option.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Choice Models:
Consumer Heuristics

Consumer Heuristics:




A heuristic is a general rule of thumb that consumers use to
simplify a decision task.
In one variety of heuristics, the non-compensatory model, a
low rating on a single attribute can eliminate a brand from
consideration.
High ratings on other attributes do not compensate for low
ratings on the first attribute
Noncompensatory models are likely to be used in many
simple and low-involvement decisions because they offer
shortcuts and reduce cognitive effort.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Choice Models:
Satisficing Decisions

Satisficing Decisions:



Consumers often make purchase decisions in situations in
which information about some alternatives is not available.
consumers choose an alternative that satisfies their most
important goals. Other goals might be sacrificed.
Compared to the expected utility theory, the satisficing
theory is more descriptive of how consumers actually make
choices.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Choice Models:
Elimination by Aspects

Another kind of noncompensatory consumer heuristic is to
eliminate some options on the basis of single attribute.



Consumers could reject alternatives by starting with the most
important attribute first, but this does not have to be the case.
A consumer could also start with any random attribute.
Elimination is a consumer choice strategy that is adopted to
deal with the information overload that exists in many
markets.
Conjunctive rule: eliminate any alternatives that fall outside
of certain predefined boundaries.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Other Choice Models
 Inference

enables consumers to make a choice without complete
information by generalizing from the information they know.
 List

Making
Making
a simplification strategy involving lists that contain products,
brand names and/or attributes.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Other Choice Models
 Relational

compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of an option
to those of other options in a particular background context.
 Prospect

Heuristics
Theory
builds on the notion that consumers have to give up something
in order to get something back in the marketplace; proposes
that people’s decisions are based on how they value the
potential gains and losses that result from making choices.
Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Key Terms
affect
 attention
 attitude
 attitude formation
 attitude models
 attitude strength
 attitude toward the ad
 awareness
 balance theory
 behavior

expected utility theory
 experiential hierarchy of
effects
 extended Fishbein model
 Fishbein model
 functional theory of
attitudes
 heuristic
 identification
 inference making

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Key Terms (continued)
behavioral intentions
 beliefs
 choice models
 cognition
 cognitive consistency
 cognitive dissonance
 compensatory models
 compliance
 conjoint analysis

internalized
 knowledge function
 list making
 low-involvement hierarchy of
effects
 multiattribute attitude models
 noncompensatory models
 persuasion
 persuasion knowledge model

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Key Terms (continued)
conjunctive rule
 constructive choice
processes
 ego-defensive function
 elaboration likelihood
model
 elimination by aspects
 endowment effect
 evoked set

preference
 relational heuristic
 satisficing decisions
 self-perception theory
 social judgement theory
 standard hierarchy of effects
 utilitarian function
 utility functions
 value-expressive function

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.