Some of us may have already passed our moody teenage attitude by now, but no matter what, as consumers we have attitudes towards brands (and sometimes still our parents). But are these attitudes genuine? I think not!
“An attitude is a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way with respect to a given object.” (Algie, 2019)
What does this mean in a day to day context? Let’s say you want to buy a streaming service, because you have been to your friend’s place and you watched something on Netflix together. Your Netflix and Chill may have been a good time, and that creates a learned predisposition. Thus, an attitude is created where you think of Netflix first and this is favourable towards the service. Using this example, the following diagram is an appropriate explanation of how attitudes are formed.
This diagram states that we form our attitudes on our surrounding environment, such as family and friends or the ever-present media. This is a fairly simple concept in consumer behaviour. A more product specific attitude theory is the “Hierarchy of Effects”.
Hierarchy of Effects
The hierarchy of effects explores the sequential relationships of a consumer’s thoughts, feelings and decisive behaviours (Solomon et. al., 2019). It organises the process of how a decision is made based on learning, feeling and doing. Above is the diagram. Why do we need this diagram? It is used to predict consumer behaviour and influence behaviour to allocate a certain brand into their lifestyle (Wijaya, 2015). To apply this theory back to Stan., this would be an experiential hierarchy process due to Stan. being a hedonic purchase. This means that the entertainment factor weighs on the consumer’s decision making process, meaning the affect is the first step – “feel’. To accommodate for this process, Stan. offers free trials for one month which allows consumers to “feel” or try out the product so that they can then “do” or “learn”. Ultimately, the hedonistic purchaser is analysing or trying to appeal to their emotional reactions. Thus, marketers influence the marketing message to affect the attitude evoked unto the consumer, this is called emotional contagion (Solomon et. al., 2019).
The Hierarchy of Effects model is based off the structural models of attitudes. This shows how all stages of attitude formation are interrelated and how there is no particular order.
Affect = Feel
Conation (Behaviour) = Do
Cognition = Learn
However, there are some setbacks with the the HOE model as discussed by Smith. Consumers must begin with no awareness of the advertised brand using the HOE model (Smith et. al., 2008), which is not feasible with big brands in modern society. This is because the model attempts to create an attitude, but if there is already awareness, there is a form of attitude whether it is small or large. Therefore, the model works off of advertising to appeal to the consumer goal so a marketer aims to “orient cognitive resources toward processing the ad and brand” (Smith et. al., 2008). It is mainly an advertising model , and it was developed for traditional mass media which may pose issues within modern society (Poh, 2002) . The basis of this whole model is exposure and how they feel about the product, which can be very difficult when they have already been exposed minimally, or even almost subliminally due to the amount of advertisements viewed daily. This model is still highly relevant in consumer behaviour, I just wanted to raise a problem found in my research!
Reference List
- Poh, D.M.H. and Adam, S., 2002, January. An exploratory investigation of attitude toward the website and the advertising hierarchy of effects. In AusWeb02, the Web enabled global village: proceedings of AusWeb02, the eighth Australian World Wide Web Conference (pp. 620-631). Southern Cross University.
- Smith, R.E., Chen, J. and Yang, X., 2008. The impact of advertising creativity on the hierarchy of effects. Journal of advertising, 37(4), pp.47-62.
- Solomon, Michael R, Russell-Bennet, Rebekah & Previte, Josephine 2019, Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having and Being, 4th ed., Pearson Australia, Melbourne, VIC.
- Wijaya, B.S., 2015. The development of hierarchy of effects model in advertising. International Research Journal of Business Studies, 5(1).