2. 15 Consumer Attitudes and Decisions Chapter McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Copyright © 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

3. Learning Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Define attitudes and how they are acquired, strengthened, and changed.
Distinguish cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of attitudinal responses.
Understand why consumers have attitudes.
Apply several attitude theories to consumer behavior.
Understand how consumer attitudes and decisions are shaped by consumer goals and involvements.

4. Learning Objectives (continued)
Understand the constructive nature of consumer attitudes and decisions and how they are shaped by culture and social context.
Distinguish the role of emotions in consumer attitudes and decisions.
Describe several practical tools consumers use to make decisions.
Relate consumer attitudes and decisions to other topics covered in this textbook.

5. Overview
Consumers formulate, strengthen, and change their attitudes about many different objects and reference these attitudes in responding to situations and deciding what actions to take.
Attitude – an evaluation of a concept or object, such as an issue, person, group, brand, or service that expresses a degree of favor or disfavor.
Attitude object -- the entity that gets evaluated – may be abstract, concrete, individual or collective
Judgment – estimate of the likelihood of an event
Decision – makes a selection between options or courses of action

6. Overview
Adaptive decision maker – exploits and adapts to aspects of the environment in order to make decisions to achieve goals.
Judgments are closely related to attitudes and crucial in whether and how consumers make decisions.

7. Why Consumers have Attitudes
Functional theory of attitudes – help consumers cope with their environments.
Five functions of attitudes
Knowledge function – help us organize and simplify experiences and stimuli
Utilitarian function – help us to act in our own self-interest by seeking rewards and avoiding punishments

8. Why Consumers have Attitudes
Value-expressive function – allows important aspects of the self to be expressed
Ego-defensive function – provide defense against internal and external threats to self-concept
Social-adjustment function – facilitate, maintain, and disrupt social relationships

9. Attitudes
Attitudes are embedded in in broader social and cultural structures that represent consumers’ attitudes toward other people and reference groups.
Attitudes can serve multiple functions, however, typically one function dominates.
It is important for marketers to understand the dominant function a product serves
Matching hypothesis – persuasion will be maximized when message content is matched to the functional basis of the attitude.

10. Attitudes Functions that attitudes serve vary in importance
cross-culturally

11. How Attitudes are Structured
An attitude is an internal state and not directly observable.
The nature and structure of attitudes is inferred from observable responses and some understanding of how the mind works.
An attitude object is anything that can be held in mind by the consumer.
Attitudes toward one’s self are termed self-esteem.
Attitudes toward abstract goals or end states are usually known as values.

12. How Attitudes are Structured
Attitude toward the ad (Aad) – whether the consumer likes or dislikes an ad
Determinants of Aad attitude 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
Mood-management theory – assumes consumers strive to eliminate or at least diminish bad moods and perpetuate good ones by selecting appropriate media.

13. Attitude Characteristics
Attitude availability
Attitude accessibility
Attitude strength
Constructed attitude

14. Attitude Dimensions and Relationships
Affective dimension
Behavioral dimension
Cognitive dimension
Attitudes are not isolated in consumers’ minds but are linked to other attitudes.
Balance theory describes elements in the environment as appearing in groups of three.
Consumer
Attitude object (such as a brand)
Some other person

15. Exhibit 15.2 Balance Theory and Attitude Change

16. Attitude Relationships
Consumers believe that they ordinarily agree with people they like and disagree with people they dislike, and information is more readily learned and retained when this is the case.
Celebrity endorsers
Ideologies – clusters of attitudes and beliefs that are interdependent in the sense that they are organized around a dominant theme.
Attitudes may be formed as an implication or deduction from a more general attitude that has already been formed.
Attitudes are embedded in a complex network of relations between attitudes, beliefs, and values where certain core values are strongly held and are linked to many other attitudes, beliefs, and values.

17. Different Theories about Attitudes
Affective, cognitive, behavioral
Help us understand how attitudes are formed, strengthened, and changed
Dissonance Theory – proposes that when a consumer’s beliefs and behaviors don’t agree, it produces discomfort and the person is motivated to alter something in order to bring them into alignment

18. Elaboration Likelihood Model
A theory about the processes responsible for attitude change and the strength of the attitudes that result from these processes.
Elaboration likelihood continuum – how motivated and able people are to assess the central merits of the attitude object (person, brand, advertisement, issue).
Central route to persuasion
Peripheral route to persuasion
ELM posits that attitude change varies to the extent that it is based on mental effort

19. How ELM is Related to Other Attitude Theories
Mere exposure effect – capable of making the consumer’s attitude toward the object more positive
Can happen even when the consumer doesn’t consciously recognize that the object is familiar – with stimuli such as foreign words, faces, and nonsense stimuli – processed peripherally, but not consciously processed and stored
Mere exposure effects are reduced if meaningful stimuli are presented or if consumers consciously thing about the stimuli
Consequently, the mere exposure effect is likely to work only when elaboration is low.

20. How ELM is Related to Other Attitude Theories (continued)
Expectancy-value model – posits that attitudes are a function of beliefs and that attitudes (alone or with other factors) predict behavioral intentions.
ELM recognized that these models, in addition to neglecting the emotional dimension of attitudes, also assume high0effort, central-route processing. Thus, they are appropriately used to model attitudes and intentions only when elaboration likelihood is high and consumers are likely to rely predominantly on beliefs rather than emotions in formulating their attitudes

21. What the ELM Doesn’t Do
Tests of ELM have generally not taken symbolic, hedonic, and aesthetic motives into account.
They have been biased toward verbal information and linguistic performance and tended to disregard pictorial, music, and other nonlanguage aspects of marketing communications.
Deals poorly with these cultural differences in information processing
Its emphasis on the individual as an information processor – becomes clear in highly interdependent cultural contexts

22. Theory of Reasoned Action (TORA)
Predict behavior
Marketers are often interested in influencing consumers’ voluntary conscious choices.
Most important determinant of consumer behavior is behavioral intentions
Suggests that attitudes are affected by beliefs linked to behaviors and by what others believe and how important complying with those beliefs is.

23. Exhibit 15.3 The Theory of Reasoned Action

24. Marketing Implications of TORA
Intuitive appeal and support
Measurement is a challenge
Each component can be targeted
Strategies
Change the strength of consumers’ beliefs
Make a belief more positive or less negative in order to make attitudes more positive
Emphasizing a core benefit associated with a product
Add new beliefs
Target normative beliefs – especially in cultures and contexts where social influence is powerful

25. TORA Changing Beliefs or Adding New Beliefs

26. The Theory of Planned Behavior
Expands behaviors encompassed in TORA
Mirrors the TORA except that it recognizes that behavioral intentions and behavior sometimes depend on perceived behavioral control – consumers’ perception of how easy or difficult it is to perform the behavior.
Self-control depends on standards, a monitoring process, and the capacity to alter one’s behavior.
Behavioral monitoring is a key to self-control
Exercising self-control seems to deplete a crucial resource that is then no longer available to help a consumer exert self-control on other tasks – ego depletion.

27. Consumer Judgments
A crucial input into decisions, but they do not require the consumer to make a decision
Just estimates regarding the likelihood of an event
In making judgments consumers process information differently than when they are asked to make choices; nevertheless, choices typically involve making some judgments as well

28. Making Judgments
Anchor-and-adjust process
Simulation heuristic
Availability heuristic
Representativeness heuristic

29. Adaptive Decision Makers
Exploit and adapt to aspects of the environment in order to make decisions to achieve goals.
Goal relevance
Goal congruence

30. Consumer Action without Decisions
Much consumer action is born from habit or ritual, enactments of personal or cultural scripts.
Habit, doing the same thing every time, makes life simpler and more manageable and reduces risk.
Substantial involvement, care and meaning without any decisions
Homemade ice cream
Grandmother’s special Christmas cookies

31. Economic Models
Utility-maximizing View – consumer decisions made based on realizing the largest net benefit in terms of the exchange resources at issue.
Expected Utility Theory – assumes decision makers are rational and have complete information; consumers are assumed to have complete information about the probabilities and consequences attached to each alternative course of action.

32. Utility Functions
Refers to the amount of happiness that a consumer derives from a product or from a product attribute.
Useful in consumer behavior research because they can be estimated with a method called conjoint analysis.
Individual maximizer theory is a weak strategy to adopt in marketing to members of interdependent cultures.
Buyers seek more social information and more likely to be interested in outcomes that produce or reinforce trust and relationships between buyers and sellers.

33. Prospect Theory
Examines how consumers value potential gains and losses that result from making choices
Individual’s value function – reflects consumers’ anticipation of the pleasure/pain associated with a specific decision outcome
Gains/losses are calculated with respect to some reference point
Value function for gains is quite different than that for losses
Consumers resist giving up things that they already own – endowment effect
Decision framing – the manner in which the task is defined or represented
Risk averse versus Risk seekers

34. Other Choice Models Inference Making List Making
enables consumers to make a choice without complete information by generalizing from the information they know.
List Making
a simplification strategy involving lists that contain products, brand names and/or attributes.

35. Exhibit 15.5 A Value Function: Gains and Losses

36. Other Decision Models Satisficing Cognitive models Compensatory models
Noncompensatory models
Lexicographic model
Elimination-by-aspects model
Conjunctive model
Disjunctive model
Affective models

37. Simple Strategies for Making Decisions
Brand loyalty
Brand familiarity
Country of origin
Price-related strategies
Avoiding regret

38. Key Terms Adaptive decision maker Attitude toward the ad
Affective dimension of attitudes
Anchor-and-adjust process
Attitude
Attitude accessibility
Attitude availability
Attitude object
Attitude strength
Attitude toward the ad
Availability heuristic
Avoiding regret
Balance theory
Behavioral dimension of attitudes
Brand familiarity
Brand loyalty
Central route to persuasion

39. Key Terms (continued) Cognitive dimension of attitudes
Cognitive models
Compensatory models
Conjunctive model
Constructed attitude
Country of origin
Decision
Decision framing
Disjunctive model
Dissonance theory
Ego depletion
Ego-defensive function
Elaboration likelihood continuum
Elaboration likelihood model
Elimination-by-aspects model
Embodied decision making
Endowment effect
Evoked set
Expectancy value model

40. Key Terms (continued) Expected utility theory Functional theory
Goal congruence
Goal relevance
Ideologies theory of attitude structure
Judfment
Knowledge function
Lexicographic model
Matching hypothesis
Mere exposure effect
Mood management theory
Noncompensatory models
Perceived behavioral control