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Attitudes and Intentions Dealing with the Consumer

Attitudes and Intentions Dealing with the Consumer Attitudes and intentions have always been a major part of the marketers’ research. Attitudes, a person’s overall evaluation of a concept, is used in the integration process to see how an object is thought of and viewed. Intentions also determine most voluntary behaviors. Measures of consumers’ intentions may not be perfect indicators of the actual intentions that determine the behavior. Throughout the paper, I will discuss the relationship between attitudes and intentions and the part they both play on the marketing plan. Attitude has been called “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.” (Fishbein 1-19) And it is one of the most important concepts marketers use to understand consumers. This is because marketers have been able to use attitudes as key tools in the research process. Over the years, researchers have tried a variety of approaches to studying attitudes in an attempt to provide a more complete understanding of behavior. This behavior of consumers has thought to be strategically dependent on the attitudes of the consumers. Although the dominant approach to attitudes has changed over the years, nearly all definitions of attitude have one thing in common: they all refer to a person’s overall evaluation of a concept. (Fazio 204-43) Evaluations are affective responses at relatively low levels of intensity and arousal, created by both the affective and cognitive systems. The affective system automatically produces affective responses – including emotions, feelings, moods, and evaluations or attitudes – as immediate, direct responses to certain stimuli. These stimuli may or may not affect the response, depending on the environment at which the test is being performed. The cognitive processing model of consumer decision making shows that an overall evaluation is formed when consumers combine knowledge, meaning, or beliefs about the attitude concept. (Allen 301-15) This means that the overall evaluation is also dependent upon the accumulation of certain aspects of the attitude concept. Thurstone introduced one of the earliest definitions of attitude in 1931. He viewed attitude as a fairly simple concept – the amount of affect a person has for or against an object. A few years later, Allport proposed a much broader definition: “Attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness to respond, organized through experience, and exerting a directive and/or dynamic influence on behavior.” (Lutz 234-5) Today, most researchers agree that the simple concept of an attitude proposed by Thurstone and Fishbein is the most useful. That is, attitude represents a person’s favorable or unfavorable feelings toward the object in question. For example, if a person’s feelings towards an institution of higher learning are unfavorable, the attitude is generally not too good towards that institution. Beliefs (cognition) and intentions to behave (conation) are seen as related to attitude but are separate cognitive concepts, not part of attitude itself. (Myers-Levy 76-86) So, both cognition and conation are related to attitude but directly. Objects and behaviors are the two broad types of concepts that most interest marketers. Consumers can have attitudes toward various physical and social objects including products, brands, models, stores, and people, as well as aspects of the marketing strategy. Consumers also can have attitudes toward imaginary objects such as concepts and ideas. It does not matter if the object is real or perceived it still has relevance to consumers whether it is a brand like Coca-Cola or if it is an idea like having car alarms in all of the 2001 models. A 1997 survey of Americans’ attitudes toward pollution and the environment found that, compared to five years ago, 76 percent were more concerned, 19 percent were less concerned, and 6 percent were unchanged. (Fishbein 1-19) Once an attitude has been formed and stored in memory, consumers do not have to engage in another integration process to construct another attitude when they need to evaluate the concept again. Instead, the existing attitude can be activated from memory and used as a basis for interpreting new information. Because activated attitudes can influence consumers’ judgements, taste test usually are conducted blind (tasters are not told what brands they are tasting). This avoids activating brand attitudes that could persuade the taste judgements. Finally, the activated attitude can be integrated with other knowledge in decision making. (d’Astous 132-37) Consumers’ attitudes have been studied intensively, but marketers tend to be more concerned about consumers’ overt behavior, especially their purchase behavior. It is not surprising that a great deal of research has been primarily devoted to the relationship between attitudes and behavior. (Jaccard 600-5) Based on the idea of consistency, you might expect attitudes toward an object. For instance, “most market researchers believe, and operate under the assumption, that the more favorable a person’s attitude toward a given product (or brand). (Fishbein 3) Predicting consumers’ future behaviors, especially their purchase behavior, is critically important aspect of forecasting and marketing planning. According to the theory of reasoned action, predicting consumers’ purchase behaviors is a matter of measuring their intentions to buy just before they make a purchase. In almost all cases, however, this would be impractical. When planning strategies, marketers need predictions of consumers’ purchase and use behaviors weeks, months, or sometimes years in advance. Unfortunately, predictions of specific behaviors based on intentions measured well before the behavior occurs may not be very accurate. For instance, one survey found that only about 60 percent of people who intended to buy a car actually did so within a year. (Longman 28-37) Similar examples could be cited for other product categories. This does not mean the theory of reasoned action is wrong in identifying intentions as an immediate influence on behavior. Rather, failures to predict the behavior of interest often lie with how and when intentions are measured. To accurately predict behaviors, marketers should measure consumers’ intentions at the same level of abstraction and specificity as the action, target, and time components of the behavior. Certain behaviors cannot be accurately predicted from beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. (Foxall 231-41) It is also difficult to predict purchase behaviors when the alternatives are very similar and the person has positive attitudes toward several of them. Finally, behaviors about which consumers have little knowledge and low levels of involvement are virtually impossible to predict because consumers have very few beliefs in memory on which to base attitudes and intentions. In such cases, consumers’ measured intentions were probably created to answer the marketing researcher’s question; such intentions are likely to be unstable and poor predictors of eventual, actual behavior. In conclusion, before relying on measures of attitude and intentions to predict future behavior, marketers need to determine whether consumers can be expected to have well- informed beliefs, attitudes, and intentions toward those behaviors. Bibliography: Allen, Chris T. and Thomas J. Madden, “A Closer Look at Classical Conditioning,” Journal of Consumer Research, December 1985, pp. 301-15. d’Astous, Alain and Marc Dubuc, “Retrieval Processes in Consumer Evaluative Judgement Making: The Role of Elaborative Processing,” in Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 13, ed. Richard J. Lutz (Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1986), pp. 132-37. Fazio, Russell H., “How Do Attitudes Guide behavior?” in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, ed. R.M. Sorrentino and E.T. Higgins (New York: Guiford Press, 1986), pp. 204-43. Fishbein, Martin, “ An Overview of the Attitude Construct,” in A Look Back, A Look Ahead, ed. G.B. Hafer (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1980), pp. 1-19. Foxall, Gordon R., “ Consumers’ Intentions and Behavior: A Note on Research and a Challenge to Researchers,” Journal of Market Research Society 26 (1985), pp. 231- 41. Jaccard, Jacob and Grant Wood, “An Idiothetic Analysis of Attitude - Behavior Models,” in Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 13, ed. Richard J. Lutz (Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1996), pp. 600-5. Longman, Kenneth A. “Promises, Promises,” in Attitude Research on the Rocks, eds. L. Adler and L. Crespi (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1968), pp. 28-37. Lutz, Richard J., “The Role of Attitude Theory in Marketing,” in Perspectives in Consumer Behavior, 3rd ed., ed. H.H. Kassarjian and T.S. Robertson (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1981), pp. 234-5. Myers-Levy, Joan, “Printing Effects on Product Judgements: A Hemispheric Interpretation,” Journal of Consumer Research, June 1989, pp. 76-86.

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