a lasting, general evaluation of people (including oneself), objects, advertisements, or issues.
Functional Theory of Attitudes
developed by Katz to explain how attitudes facilitate social behavior. According to this, attitudes exist because they serve some function for the person.
relates to the basic principles of reward and punishment. We develop some attitudes toward products because they provide pleasure or pain.
relate to the consumer's central values or self-concept. What does the product say about me? They are highly relevant to lifestyle analyses.
attitudes we form to protect ourselves either from external threats or internal feelings and insecurities.
we form some attitudes because we need order, structure, or meaning. This function applies when a person is in an ambiguous situation (only jeans on Friday) or is confronting a new product.
Standard learning hierarchy
think-->feel-->do; assumes that a person approaches a product decision as a problem-solving process. This hierarchy assumes high involvement.
do-->feel-->think; assumes the consumer initially doesn't have a strong preference for one brand over another; instead she acts on limited knowledge and evaluates after buying the product (behavioral learning)
the lowest level of involvement; we form an attitude because it helps us to gain rewards or avoid punishment. It is superficial and likely to change.
at high levels of involvement, deep seated attitudes become part of our value system. They are difficult to change.
Principle of cognitive consistency
we value harmony among our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and a need to maintain uniformity among these elements motivates us. If necessary, we change our thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to make them consistent with our experiences.
something a person believes about himself, a behavior he performs, or an observation about his surroundings.
provides an alternative explanation of dissonance effects. It assumes we observe our own behavior to determine just what our attitudes are.
marketers know that a consumer is more likely to comply with a big request if he agrees to a smaller one.
Social judgment theory
assumes people assimilate new information about attitude objects in light of what they already know or feel (lifting a light box after lifting a heavy one).
Latitudes of acceptance and rejection
people differ in terms of the information they find acceptable or unacceptable and evaluate ideas falling within a latitude favorable, but will reject those outside this zone.
people tend to perceive messages within their latitude of acceptance as more consistent to their position than they actually are.
we tend to see messages that fall in our latitude of rejection as even more unacceptable than they actually are.
considers how a person perceives relations among different attitude objects, and how he alters his attitudes so that these remain consistent or "balanced."
attitude structures containing a person and his perceptions of an attitude object and some other person or object. We want relations among these things to be harmonious and will change our perceptions to restore balance if necessary.
specify the different elements that might work together to influence people's evaluations of attitude objects.
Multiattribute attitude models
assume that a consumer's attitude toward an attitude object depends on the beliefs she has about several of its attributes; used because attitudes are so complex.
cognitions about the specific attribute object; measures the extent to which the consumer perceives that a brand possesses a particular attribute.
multiply a consumer's rating of each attribute for all brands considered by the importance rating of that attribute to obtain overall attitude scores
specifies the elements marketers need to control in order to communicate with their customers: Source—message—medium—receiver—feedback.
a strategy that acknowledges a marketer will be much more successful when he communicates with consumers who have already agreed to listen to him.
the set of technologies that enable users to creat