Customer Attitude Formation

What is an Attitude?
An attitude is a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way with respect to a given object whether it is a product, product category, a brand, a service, an advertisement, a website, a store etc.,
Each property of this definition is critical to understanding why and how attitudes are relevant in consumer behaviours and marketing.
The 4 broad categories of attitude models are:
1. Tri component attitude model
2. Multiattribute attitude model
3. Trying to Consume Model
4. Attitude toward the ad Model

The tri componenet model of attitudes consists fo 3 parts:
1. A cognitive Component
2. An affective Component
3. A conative component
The cognitive component captures a consumer's knowledge and perceptions about products and services.
The affective component focuses on a cusotmer's emotions or feelings with respect to a particular product or service. The affective component determines an individual's overall asessment of the attitue object in terms of some kind of favourableness scoring.
The Conative component is concerned with the likelihood that a consumer will act in a specific fashion with respect to the attitude object. The Conative component is many times treated as an expression of the customer's intention to buy.

Multiattribute attitude models like attitude toward object, attitude toward behaviour and the theory of reasoned action models have received much attention from consumer researchers.

These models examine consumer beliefs about specific product attributes.

The thoery of trying is designed to account for the many cases in which the action or outcome is not certain. The attitude toward the ad models examine the influence of advertisements on the consumer's attitudes toward the brand.

How attitudes are formed?
Attitudes are learned and the different learning theories provide unique insights as to how attitudes initially may be formed. Attitude formation is facilitated by direct personal experience and influenced by the ideas and experiences of friends and family members and exposure to mass media.
Individual's personality also plays a role in attitude formation.

Strategies of Attitude Change can be put into 6 distinct categories:
1. Changing the basic motivational function
2. Associating the attitude object with a specific function
3. Relating the attitude object to conflicting attitudes
4. Aleting components of the multiattribute model
5. Changing beliefs about competititor's brands, products and Services
6. The Elaborated Likelihood Model.
Each of these strategies provide the marketer with alternative ways of changing consumer's existing attitudes.

Cognitive disssonance theory suggests that the conflicting thoughts or information, following a purchase might propel consumers to change their attitudes to make them consonant with their actions.

Attribution theory focuses on how people assign casuality to events and how they form or alter attitudes as an outcome of assessing their own behaviour or the behaviour of the other people ro things.

What are you doing to ensure that your potential customers are creating favourable attitudes towards your company, brand, product and services? How are your competitors doing it?

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