How do consumers develop judgments and feelings about products? - Chapter 4

How can attitude be described as a matter of contention?

Attitudes are thought to be great determinants of (consumer) behavior.

Defining the concept

Attitudes are evaluative responses, directed towards some attitude object and are based on three classes of information: cognitive, affective/emotional, and behavioral. Attitude objects may be abstract (e.g. materialism) or concrete (e.g. Audi) and may be individuals (David Beckham) or categories (candy). One might infer one’s brand attitude from the frequency with which one has recently used the brand. Attitudes can derive from three general classes of information or experiences and the basis for any attitude can vary. An attitude towards an object can be based on cognitive information about the aspects that characterize the object, which can derive from someone’s own direct experience of the attitude object or from communications about the object (e.g. advertisements). Attitudes can also be based on affective or emotional reactions that the attitude object evokes. Finally, attitudes can be based on behavioral information.

The major points of contention are (1) whether attitudes should be defined as a predisposition to evaluate an attitude object in a particular way or as the evaluative response itself, and (2) whether attitudes are stable or context dependent. The most influential definition of attitude is that it is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of (dis)favor. This predisposition to evaluate is expressed by cognitive, affective or behavioral evaluative responses. Cognitive evaluative responses consist of the beliefs people hold about the attitude object. Affective evaluative responses consist of the feelings, moods and emotions people experience when confronted with the attitude object. Behavioral evaluative responses consist the intention to act or the overt actions people perform in relation to an attitude object.

Implicit and explicit attitudes: challenging the unity of the attitude concept

Implicit attitudes are evaluations of which the individual is typically not aware and which influence (re)actions over which the individual has little to no control.

Explicit attitudes, on the other hand, are evaluations of which the individual is consciously aware and which can be expressed using self-report measures.

An instrument that is said to assess implicit attitudes is the affective priming method. This procedure presents individuals on each trial with a prime followed by positive or negative adjectives. Then they are asked to decide as fast as possible whether the adjective was positive or negative. The time it takes people to make this judgment is the dependent measure. The basic assumption is that the attitude prime automatically activates an evaluative response and that this response will in turn either facilitate or inhibit the evaluative response to the next stimulus (the adjective). Whether the evaluative response will inhibit or facilitate the subsequent response depends on whether the prime and target are evaluatively different or similar.

Implicit attitudes can also be assessed by the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which also uses response latencies to infer implicit attitudes. It assesses the strength of an association between two concepts with positive and negative evaluations, and is often used to assess stereotypes. The response delays are derived from the participants’ use of two response keys, which have been assigned a dual meaning. The underlying assumption is that if a person holds a negative attitude towards minorities, his/her response time will be shorter when minority words share the same key with negative words than with positive words. This assumption has often been supported by research.

Modern advertising faces a discrepancy between explicit and implicit consumer responses.

Not many consumers are willing to admit that they are often heavily influenced by advertising in their shopping behavior and thus, scales designed to tap the persuasive influence of advertising often reveal a skeptic and resistant consumer. More implicit measures are needed to reveal advertising’s impact on consumer perceptions and behavior. Wilson et al. explained this by suggesting that persuasive advocacies (like advertising) or new experiences might result in the creation of a new, second attitude without replacing the old one. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object, one on an automatic, implicit level, and one on a controlled, explicit level. For example, people who often went to McDonald’s in their childhood (positive attitude) now never go anymore because they found out it is unhealthy (negative attitude).

Are attitudes stable or context-dependent?

There is empirical evidence for both stability and malleability of attitudes. Attitudes can change with changing context and can be placed on a continuum of strength. This ranges from issues which are novel or irrelevant (weak), to issues which are familiar and important (strong). Through heavy advertising, initially unfamiliar brands can become highly accessible in consumers’ minds.

Implications for the definition of the attitude concept

There are problems concerning the dispositional definitions of the attitude concept. The authors of this book favor. the definition suggested by Zanna and Rempel. They see attitudes as ‘the categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension’ (p. 135).

What is the strength of attitude?

Attitude strength links aspects of attitude structure and attitude function. Stronger attitudes are characterized by:

• Higher stability over time;

• Greater impact on behavior;

• Greater influence on information processing;

• Greater resistance to persuasion.

Determinants of attitude strength are accessibility, importance, knowledge, certainty, ambivalence, and evaluative-cognitive consistency.

Accessibility

Cognitive accessibility refers to how easily or quickly the attitude can be retrieved from memory. The faster the attitude can be retrieved from memory, the stronger the association between the representation of the attitude object and the evaluation. Regarding brand attitudes, accessibility of a brand is also know as brand awareness; the ease with which consumers can recall or recognize the brand. Highly accessible attitudes are more predictive of behavior than attitudes of low accessibility. They are also more resistant to social influence.

Attitude importance

Attitude importance is usually measured by asking people how important an attitude object is to them personally, how deeply they care about it, and how concerned they are about it. Since attitude importance reflects the degree of caring and concern about an attitude issue, you would expect that people would also be motivated to want to know more about important issues. However, knowledge about an attitude seems to be only moderately positively related to its importance. Individuals with a lot of knowledge should be better able to evaluate the validity of arguments about that issue than individuals with little knowledge. Therefore well-informed persons should be more influenced by strong arguments, while uninformed people are more influenced by heuristic cues.

Attitude certainty

Attitude certainty refers to the confidence individuals have in the validity or correctness of their own attitude. It is possible to hold a neutral attitude with a high degree of certainty. Attitude certainty is positively correlated with extremity and importance.

Ambivalence

Attitudinal ambivalence involves a state in which an individual gives an attitude object equivalently strong positive or negative evaluation, i.e. both likes and dislikes the object. Strategies to assess this are measuring ambivalence as an experienced state or as structural ambivalence (calculated from evaluations). Attitudinal ambivalence seems to be related to several attributes that are characteristic of attitude strength. Attitude objects associated with greater structural ambivalence are less cognitively accessible than attitude objects associated with less ambivalence. Ambivalent attitudes are less predictive of behavior and less resistant to social influence than non-ambivalent attitudes. There is also a lot of evidence that ambivalent attitudes are less resistant to social influence than non-ambivalent attitudes. Finally, ambivalent attitudes have been found to be positively related to processing motivation.

The previous discussion of ambivalence is limited to ambivalence in established attitudes. This kind of ambivalence is likely to differ from the ambivalence evoked by exposure to evaluatively inconsistent information during the formation of a new attitude; an issue particularly relevant for the consumer domain, because of the high amount of evaluatively inconsistent information. Our knowledge about ambivalence so far suggests that attitudes formed on the basis of ambivalent information would be less predictive of behavior than attitudes that are formed on the basis of consistent information. However, dual process theories of attitude change – which suggest that attitudes formed on the basis of elaborate processing are more predictive of behavior than attitudes based on superficial processing – would predict the opposite. Because the integration of inconsistent information is more difficult than that of consistent information, you could expect participants who are presented with evaluatively inconsistent information to engage in deeper processing to form an overall evaluation. If this is the case, you would expect that attitudes formed from evaluatively inconsistent information should be better predictors of behavior than attitudes based on consistent information. Although some research supports this theory, these findings were limited to situations where individuals both feel a need to form an overall evaluation and succeed in integrating the evaluatively inconsistent information into an overall evaluation, because all the details were cognitively accessible. Another study showed that when participants are unable to integrate the inconsistent information, the pattern reversed.

Evaluative-cognitive consistency

Evaluative-cognitive consistency refers to the consistency between people’s attitudes towards an attitude object and the evaluative implications of their beliefs about the object. More consistent attitudes are more resistant to social influence than attitudes of low consistency.

Attitude strength and the context dependence of attitudinal judgments

Attitude strength is suggested to be the moderating variable responsible for the conflicting evidence on the context stability of attitudes. A lot of studies support this assumption.

What does the formation of attitude consist of?

Attitudes derive from cognitive, evaluative/affective and behavioral information. Two criteria will be used to distinguish between processes of attitude formation and attitude change. Attitude formation is involved when the issue or object is new and unfamiliar. It is based on low effort cognitive processes that require little cognitive elaboration such as evaluative conditioning or heuristic processing. These processes will be discussed in this section.

The formation of cognitively based evaluative responses

Beliefs about an attitude object are based on information individuals have gathered about the object. They can derive this information indirectly, or from personal experience. Brand-quality, country, and price-quality heuristics may also be used to predict quality.

Attitudes based on direct experience versus memory

Direct experience results in more information than indirect experience, and attitudes based on direct experience are held with more confidence, are more stable over time, are more accessible in memory, and are more predictive of future behavior.
In their studies,

Fazio et al. proposed that attitudes derived from direct experience are more accessible in memory than attitudes based on indirect experience are responsible for their greater impact on behavior. This view was challenged by

Doll and Ajzen. According to them it is the greater temporal stability of experience-based attitudes rather than their accessibility that is responsible for the difference in attitudes. The more a person’s expectations prove to be consistent with the actual experience, the better the attitude will predict actual behavior. Greater attitude accessibility and stability are independently responsible for the fact that experience-based attitudes are better predictors of behavior than attitudes based on indirect experience. Therefore it is important to use marketing tools that promote direct experience (e.g. free samples) in addition to classic advertising.

If there is a dramatic change in context, the advantage of experience-based attitudes may be lost. Also the expertise and the trustworthiness of the source of the information has an influence on the impact of direct and indirect experience.

Using heuristics to form attitudes

People often rely on heuristics to form attitudes, based on their own experience, culture, or on advertisements. There has been a lot of research on the influence of stereotypes – beliefs about the attributes of members of an outgroup – on attitudes towards members of that group (prejudice).

The most often used heuristic cues in consumer behavior are brand names, country of origin and price. Brand image refers to the beliefs, feelings, and evaluations triggered by a brand name. Brand images are strongly influenced by advertising and are considered to be the consumer equivalent to stereotypes in intergroup relations. The impact a brand image has on someone’s judgment of, or behavior towards a product of a certain brand is referred to as brand equity; the equivalent of prejudice. Where prejudice is considered bad, brand equity is considered good. A brand associated with high quality can improve product ratings.

The country of origin of a product is another heuristic people can use to judge a product. It is especially important in buying food, because consumers believe that ethnic food products are likely to be better if they come from the country from which the food originated. As for the price-quality heuristic, people expect that expensive is good. In the service industry, duration is an important heuristic: higher quality is inferred when service duration increases, especially in relation to price (when the duration:price ratio increases).

The formation of evaluative responses based on affective or emotional experience

Three pathways to the acquisition of evaluative responses based on affective or emotional experience are:

1. Mere exposure;

2. Initially neutral stimuli can acquire positive valence through repeated exposure;

3. Classical/evaluative conditioning: by means of association with events that already have positive or negative valence;

4. Affect as information: individuals may use the affect evoked by the stimulus or the stimulus context as information about this object.

Mere exposure

Mere exposure on attitudes towards unfamiliar and novel stimuli become more positive with increasing frequency of exposure; also referred to as mere exposure effects. This phenomenon has been used to explain advertising ‘wear-in’, that is, the observation that an advertisement’s impact only increases after an ‘incubation period’ of several exposures where effects are absent/minimal. The current most widely accepted explanation for the ‘exposure effect’ suggests that the frequency of exposure increases perceptual fluency, or the ease with which information is processed. Repeated exposure results in a representation of the stimulus in memory. When the stimulus is encountered again, this representation will make it easier to encode and process the stimulus. The increased ease of processing is pleasant and positively affects the evaluation of the stimulus (hedonic fluency).

Classical and evaluative conditioning

Through classical conditioning a neutral stimulus that is initially incapable of eliciting a particular response (conditioned stimulus, CS), gradually acquires the ability to do so through repeated association with a stimulus that already evokes this response (unconditioned stimulus, US). Strategies based on this conditioning are used in advertising. Products are displayed in pleasing contexts with little relation to the product function, or linked to supermodels for example. It is assumed that the positive mood resulting from a pleasing context will be transferred to the product.

These evaluative conditioning effects can result from different processes. First, it can result from mis-attribution, that is, when the evaluation triggered by the US is mistakenly attributed to the CS. Then the CS acquires the valence that was originally associated with the US. There is no awareness of the association between the CS and US. Another process by which evaluative conditioning might occur an influence brand attitudes, is that it helps to form an association between a brand name and the affect inducing concepts. Repeatedly pairing the brand with the same positively valued US, will forge a strong link between the brand and the US. Exposure to the brand will then activate the representation of the US in memory. This process involves inferential belief-formation resulting from a mis-attribution of some aspect of the meaning of the US to the CS.
Evaluative conditioning seem to influences both explicit and implicit attitudes. However, research suggests that this kind of conditioning doesn’t affect explicit attitudes towards familiar brands for which consumers hold strong attitudes. It does seem to influence implicit attitudes towards familiar brands, but only for individuals who have no strong preference for either brand. This finding can possibly be explained by the fact that even individuals who have no strong preference for either brand are likely to have formed a set of beliefs about the attributes of these brands, and that these beliefs will have influences attitudes assessed with explicit measures. In contrast, they won’t have influenced implicit measures that reflect people’s automatic affective response to a brand; one that will have been changed through evaluative conditioning.

Affect-as-information

According to the effect-as-information hypothesis, feelings may sometimes influence evaluations through feeling-based inferences rather than through repeated association with the stimulus. Individuals infer their attitude from their present mood state.

The formation of evaluations based on behavioral information

Besides behavior as a direct experience, there are two other ways evaluations can be influenced by past behavior, namely self-perception and reinforcement. New and unfamiliar brands may particularly benefit from self-perception processes brought about by the direct experience marketing tools mentioned before. Example: people expressing more positive attitudes towards being religious after completing questionnaires designed to increase the salience of pro-religious behavior. Studies of the effects of reinforcement have shown that when the interviewer responds with ‘good’ every time a participant agrees with a positive attitude statement, the participant will end up showing a more positive attitude towards the issue than one who has been reinforced with negative direction.

What does the structure of attitude entail?

Attitudes are evaluations of an object which are based on cognitive, affective, and behavioral information. Not all attitudes have both strong cognitive, affective and behavioral components. They might have only one or two. Now we will focus on the relationship between beliefs about an attitude object and the evaluation of this object. Attitude structure affects the durability of attitudes, their stability, their resistance to influence and their impact on behavior.

Expectancy-value models

Expectancy-value models conceptualize beliefs as the sum of the expected values attributed to the attitude object. Beliefs consist of an expectancy component and a value component. The

Expectancy component reflects the individual’s confidence that the attitude object possesses the attributes they associate with it. The value component reflects the value a consumer attaches to the characteristics of an object. Expectancy-value models state that multiplication of the valuation of each attribute with the subjective probability with which it is perceived as linked to the object, can predict attitudes. The expectancy-value model can be expressed as follows:

A₀ = Σⁿ_i=1 Expectancy x Value

Rosenberg was the first to propose an expectancy-value model of attitudes. He suggested that someone’s attitude towards a certain attitude object is a function of the extent to which someone perceived the attitude object as a means to the achievement of important values or goals. The more instrumental an attitude object is perceived to be in helping the attainment of positive values or goals and blocking the attainment of negative values or goals, the more positively the consumer will evaluate the object. Since this model wasn’t very useful in predicting attitudes towards brands, Fishbein developed the approach into a general theory of attitude. His model can be summarized as follows:

A₀ = Σⁿ_i=1 b_ie_i

Are beliefs the cause of attitudes?

Rosenberg and Fishbein differed in that Fishbein’s model is essentially an information integration theory, whereas Rosenberg’s model is a consistency theory. Fishbein assumes that people’s attitudes towards a brand are completely determined by the information they possess about the product attributes, or the beliefs that are salient at the time the express their attitude (information integration theory). Rosenberg, on the other hand, makes the assumption that individuals try to achieve consistency between their evaluations and their beliefs.

Both models predict that changing people’s beliefs results in attitude change, but only Rosenberg makes the additional prediction that changing people’s evaluation of the attitude object should result in changes in their beliefs about the object.

Attitudes towards the advertisement and the dual mediation hypothesis

The Dual Mediation Hypothesis of advertisements states that the attitude towards advertisements influences brand attitudes through two pathways: indirectly via brand cognitions, and directly via evaluative conditioning. Exposure to the advertisement elicits the expectations that use of the brand will have a number of positive consequences. This positive affect is transferred to the brand through processes of evaluative conditioning. The liking for the advertisement will ‘rub off’ on the product.

What are the functions of attitudes and what are attitude objects?

Categorization and attitude formation are the basic processes that enable consumer to bring order into the chaos of an overload of stimuli.

Attitude functions: why people hold attitudes

Katz developed the most influential exposition of a functional theory and distinguished four functions of attitudes:

1. Adjustment function: Attitudes help us to maximize our rewards and minimize penalties in interactions with our environment.

2. Value-expressive function: Attitudes reflect values that are central to someone’s self-concept and expressing these attitudes might help someone to maintain relationships with important groups.

3. Ego-defense function: Attitudes can help us protect our self-esteem by avoiding acknowledgement that we and our environment aren’t always perfect.

4. Knowledge function: Attitudes provide frames of reference for understanding the world around us.

Consumer goals and the functions of consumer goods

Katz’ theory doesn’t make a clear distinction between the function of holding a certain attitude and the function the attitude object itself serves. The functional theory of consumer goods discussed here focuses exclusively on the function consumer goods and the goals consumer pursue in purchasing a certain product serve.

The relationship between attitudes, goals and intentions

Before explaining the functional theory of consumer goods, it is important to have some concept of goals and the relationship between goals, attitudes and intentions. Goals are cognitive representations of desired end-states. These end-states have to be desirable, as well as attainable. In addition, the end-state has to be perceived as an improvement over the present state (positively discrepant). When these three criteria are met and a goal is adopted, an intension is formed to reach that goal.

Goals also vary in abstractness, with values being the most abstract goals. The number of potential means that could be used to reach a goal defines the level of abstractness.

Because people often pursue multiple goals, it is useful to distinguish between focal goals – goals that are actively pursued and of which one is consciously aware – and background goals – goals that might also influence goal pursuit, but of which one isn’t necessarily explicitly aware.

Why people acquire goods

People buy goods in order to achieve a particular goal. They make choices based on the expectation that these choices will be the best means to reach that goal. These goals serve a utilitarian function: we evaluate these products in terms of their performance, reliability and quality. Other times we pursue self-expression goals. These goals convey meaning through which people communicate something about themselves to others. For example, by buying designer cloths. It is suspected that for people who buy luxury and designer goods, a major goal is to communicate or signal their elevated economic status, which has been termed conspicuous consumption. However, recent research suggests that not the rich, but people who want to appear rich seem to engage in conspicuous consumption.

The self-monitoring scale is an individual difference measure that distinguishes people for whom image aspects of a product are particularly important. People high on self-monitoring tend to be more concerned about the image they project to others than people low on self-monitoring.
Besides buying goods for a utilitarian reason or to express their identity, people also buy goods because owning these goods helps them to be the kind of person they want to be. That is, products often serve an identity-building function.

Further, an individual’s decisions regarding a certain purchase are also influenced by intrinsic (hedonic) goals. These refer to the pleasure possession and consumption or use of a good evokes.

The functional approach assumes that persuasive messages are likely to have the greatest impact if the argument matches the function the consumer good is expected to serve.

A lot of brands serve multiple goals, most often utilitarian and self-expression. When advertisers try to praise brands or products that can fulfill both goals, they usually try to emphasize both goals in the same advertisement/commercial.