1. Chapter 4 Consumers’ Product Knowledge and Involvement
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Copyright © 2010 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Levels of Product Knowledge
Consumers use different levels of product knowledge to interpret new information and make purchase choices.
Product knowledge can be at four levels:
Product class
Product form
Brands
Model/features

3. Exhibit 4.1 - Levels of Product Knowledge

4. Consumers’ Product Knowledge
Consumers can have three types of product knowledge:
Knowledge about the attributes or characteristics of products.
The positive consequences or benefits of using products.
The values the product helps consumers satisfy or achieve.

5. Products as Bundles of Attributes
Consumers often think about products and brands as bundles of attributes.
Marketers need to know:
Which product attributes are most important to consumers.
What those attributes mean to consumers.
How consumers use this knowledge in cognitive processes.

6. Products as Bundles of Attributes (cont.)
Types of product attributes:
Concrete attributes
Abstract attributes

7. Products as Bundles of Benefits
Consumers think about products and brands in terms of consequences.
Functional consequences are tangible outcomes of using a product that consumers experience rather directly.
Psychosocial consequences refer to the psychological and social outcomes of product use.

8. Products as Bundles of Benefits (cont.)
Consumers think about products and brands as bundles of benefits.
Benefits are the desirable consequences consumers seek when buying and using products and brands.
Consumers can be divided through a process called benefit segmentation.

9. Products as Bundles of Benefits (cont.)
Perceived risks concern the undesirable consequences that consumers want to avoid when they buy and use products.
Risks can be:
Physical
Financial
Functional
Psychosocial

10. Products as Bundles of Benefits (cont.)
Amount of perceived risk is influenced by:
Degree of unpleasantness of the negative consequences.
Likelihood that these negative consequences will occur.

11. Products as Value Satisfiers
Values are people’s broad life goals.
Types of values:
Instrumental
Terminal
Core
Form key elements in a self-schema.
Satisfying a value usually elicits positive affect, whereas blocking a value produces negative affect.

12. Means-End Chains of Product Knowledge
A means-ends chain links consumers’ knowledge about product attributes with their knowledge about consequences and values.
Four levels of means-end chain:
Attributes
Functional consequences
Psychosocial consequences
Values

13. Exhibit 4.4 - A Means-End Chain Model of Consumers’ Product Knowledge

14. Exhibit 4.5 - Examples of Means-End Chains

15. Identifying Consumers’ Means-End Chains
Measured by one-on-one personal interviews.
Involves two steps:
Researcher must identify/elicit the product attributes most important to each consumer.
Laddering - interview process designed to reveal how the consumer links product attributes to more abstract consequences and values.

16. Exhibit 4.6 - Identification Key Attributes Considered by Consumers

17. Means-End Chains - Marketing Implications
Provide a deeper understanding of consumers’ product knowledge.
Identify the basic ends consumers seek when they buy and use certain products and brands; gives insight into consumers’ deeper purchase motivations.
Identify the consumer-product relationship.

18. Digging for Deeper Consumer Understanding
Use of qualitative research methods:
Focus groups
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)
Elicits metaphors from consumers that reveal their deep meanings (both cognitive and affective) about a topic.

19. The ZMET Interview The ZMET interview involves the following steps:
The pre-interview instruction
Storytelling
Expand the frame
Sensory images
Vignette
Digital image

20. ZMET - Marketing Implications
Can stimulate managers’ imaginations and guide their strategic thinking about a variety of marketing problems.

21. Involvement
Involvement refers to consumers’ perceptions of importance or personal relevance for an object, event, or activity.
A motivational state that energizes and directs consumers’ cognitive and affective processes and behaviors as decisions are made.
Felt involvement emphasizes that involvement is a psychological state that consumers experience only at certain times.

22. Focus of Involvement Products and brands Physical objects People
Activities or behaviors

23. The Means-End Basis for Involvement
A consumers’ level of involvement or self-relevance depends on two aspects of the means-end chains that are activated:
Importance of self-relevance of the ends.
Strength of connections between the product knowledge level and the self-knowledge level.

24. Factors Influencing Involvement
Intrinsic self-relevance is based on consumers’ means–end knowledge stored in memory.
Acquired through past experience with a product.
Situational self-relevance is determined by aspects of the immediate physical/social environment.
Activates important consequences and values, thus making products and brands seem self-relevant.

25. Factors Influencing Involvement (cont.)
What marketers need to understand:
Focus of consumers’ involvement.
Sources that create it.

26. Exhibit 4.8 - A Basic Model of Consumer Product Involvement

27. Involvement - Marketing Implications
Understanding consumers’ product knowledge and involvement can help marketers:
Understand the critical consumer–product relationship.
Develop more effective marketing strategies.

28. Understanding the key Reasons for Purchase
Marketers can use means–end analyses to:
Identify the key attributes and consequences underlying a product purchase decision.
Understand the meaning of those concepts to consumers.

29. Understanding the Consumer-Product Relationship
Marketers need to understand the cognitive and affective aspects of consumer–product relationships.
Four market segments with different levels of intrinsic self-relevance for a product category and brand are:
Brand loyalists
Routine brand buyers
Information seekers and brand switchers

30. Influencing Intrinsic Self-Relevance
If marketers can understand the means–end knowledge that makes up consumers’ intrinsic self-relevance:
They are better able to design product attributes that consumers will connect to important consequences and values.
Over longer periods consumers’ means–end knowledge can be influenced by various marketing strategies.

31. Influencing Situational Self-Relevance
Strategies to create, modify, or maintain consumers’ situational self-relevance, usually with the goal of encouraging a purchase, include:
Semiannual clearance sales
Premiums
Special pricing strategies
Linking a product to a social cause

32. Summary Consumers don’t buy products to get attributes.
Consumers think about products in terms of their desirable and undesirable consequences—benefits, and perceived risks.
Consumers form knowledge structures called means-end chains.

33. Summary (cont.)
Consumers’ feelings of involvement are determined by intrinsic self-relevance, the means-end knowledge stored in memory.
Situational factors in the environment also influence the content of activated means-end chains and thereby affect consumers’ involvement.