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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Consumer Motivation

What is Consumer Motivation?

Motivation is the driving force within individuals that impels them to action. This driving force is produced by a state of uncomfortable tension, which exists as the result of an unsatisfied need. All individuals have needs, wants and desires. The individual's subconscious drive to reduce need-induced tensions results in behaviour that he or she anticipates will satisfy needs and thus bring about a more comfortable internal state.

All behaviour is goal oriented. Goals are the sought-after results of motivated behaviour. The form or direction that  behaviour takes-the goal that is selected-is a result of thinking processes(cognition) and previous learningn(e.g. experience).

There are 2 types of goals: generic goals and product-specific goals. A generic goal is a general category of goal that may fulfill a certain need; a product-specific goal is a specifically branded or labeled product that individual sees as a way to fulfill a need.

Product-specific needs are sometimes referred to as wants.

What are Innate Needs?

Innate Needs are those an individual is born with. They are Phyiological (biogenic) in nature; they include all factors required to sustain physical life (e.g. food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, physical safety etc.,).

What are Acquired Needs?

Acquired needs those an individual develops after birth are primarily psychological (psychogenic). They include love, acceptance, esteem, and self-fulfillment.

For any given need, there are many different and appropriate goals. The Specific goal  selected depends onteh individual's experiences, physical capacity, prevailing cultural norms and valures, and the goal's accessibility in the physical and social environment.

What is the relationship between Needs and Goals?

Needs and goals are interdependent and change in response to the individual's physical condition, environment, inteaction with other people, and experiences. As needs become satisfied, new, higher order needs emerge that must be fulfilled.

How do People deal with Failure in achieving the goals?

Failure to achieve a goal often results in feelings of frustration. Individuals react to frustration in two ways:"fight" or "flight". They may cope by finding a way around the obstacle that prohibits goal attainment or by adopting a substitute goal (fight); or they may adopt a defense mechanism that enables them to protect their self esteem (flight). Defense mechanisms include aggression, regression, rationalization, withdrawal, projection,daydreaming, identification, and repression.

Motives & Behaviours:

Motives cannto easily be inferred from consumer behaviour. People with different needs may seek fulfillment through selection of the same goals; people with the same needs may seek fulfillment through different goals. 

Although some psychologists have suggested that individuals have different needs priorities, other believe that most human beings experinece the same basic needs, to which they assign a similar priority ranking.

Maslow's heirarchy of needs theory proposes five levels of human needs; physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, egoistic needs and self actualization needs.

Other needs widely integrated into consumer advertising include the needs for power, affiliation and achievement.

What are the 3 common methods for identifying and measuring human motives?

1. Observation and Inference
2. Subjective Reports
3. Qualitative Research - including projective techniques.

None of these methods is completey reliable by itself.

Therefore researchers often use a combination of 2 or 3 techniques in tandem to assess the presence or strength of consumer motives.

What is Motivational Research ?

Motivational research is qualitative research designed to delve below the consumer's level of conscious awareness. Despite some shortcomings, motivational research has proved to be of great value to marketers concerned with developing new ideas and new copy appeals.

Market Segmentation Basics

Market Segmentation and diversity are complementary concepts. Without a diverse marketplace, composed fo many different peoples with different backgrounds, cultures,environments,paradigms, throughts processes, interests, needs and wants, there really would be little reason to segment markets.

Earlier Mass Marketing - selling the same product or service package to everyone, was the most widely used marketing strategy, before the widespread adoption of the marketing concept. In many countries this is still developing and yet to become the part of the marketing and management DNA.

Market Segmentation is to be followed as a logical way to meet customers needs. Market Segmentation is defined as the process of dividing a potential market into distinct subsets of consumers with a common need or characteristic and selecting one or more segments to target with a specially desinged marketing mix or product, price, promotion, place etc.,

Besides supporting in the development of new products, Market Segmentation research also supports in the redesigning and repositioning of existing products and services and in the creation of the appropriate promotional materials, including the selection of the most effective media for promotion.

Market Segmentation Strategies benefit both the customers and the marketers, hence they received full support from both parties. Market Segmentation is now widely used by most of the organizations including manufacturers, retailers, channels and even the not for profit sector.

9 Major Classes of Consumer Characteristics serve as the most common basis for Market Segmentation. These include:

1. Geographic Factors
2. Demographic Factors
3. Psychological Factors
4. Pyschographic Factors
5. Socio-Cultural Factors
6. Use -related Factors (Application)
7. Use - Situation Factors (Environment)
8. Benefits Expected and
9. Hybrid Forms of Segmentation like Psychographic-demographic profiles  or geodemographic factors.

Key Critera for Market Segmantation include:

1. Identification

2. Sufficiency

3. Stability

4. Accessibility.

Once one identifies potential target markets, one must decide whether to target 1 segment i.e  concentrated marketing OR to target several market segments i.e. differentiated marketing.

One has to then develop a positioning strategy for each of the selected target segment.

In some cases, one can recombine 2 or more market segments into one larger segments.

How do you Market Segmentation in your company?

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Customer & Consumer Behaviour

The study of consumer behaviour enables the marketers to fully understand and be able to predict the consumer behaviours. It deals with not only with what the customer buy, but also with why, when, where, how, and how often they buy it.

Consumer Research is the Methodology that is used to study Customer and Consumer behaviour and it takes place at every stage/phase of the consumption process: before, during, and after the purchase.

The foundation fo the consumer behaviour is the Marketing Concept. Marketing Concept is the business orientation that evovled in the second half of the last century and is picking up more and more in the current environment. Marketing Concept was the evolution of the industry over the earlier concepts of production and product.

The 3 major strategies tools fo marketing are Market Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning.

The Marketing Mix consists of a company's products and services offering(S) to customers and the pricing, promotion and distribution methods needed to accomplish the deal.

The Professional Marketers make the customers the core of the company's culture and ensure that all employees view any interaction with the customers as a part of a Customer Relationship and not just a Transaction. The Top 3 drivers of successful relationships between marketers and customers are customer value, highl levels of customer satisfaction, and building a  structure for customer retention.

Consumer behaviour is multi disciplinary, i.e it is based on various theories and concepts about people that have been developed by scientists in such diverse disciplines as economics, cultural anthropology, social psychology, sociology and psychology.

Consumer behaviour has to be an integral part of strategic market planning. 

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