The Impact of Attitude on Consumer Behavior

Transcription

1 The Impact of Attitude on Consumer Behavior Bahman Montazeri, Kambiz Sharifinia, Hossein Hadian, Seddigh Arabani Mohammadbagher, Siamak Bazarkhak MA Students of Insurance Business Management Islamic Azad University, (Rasht Branch), Guilan Iran Abstract In this paper, initially, attitude is defined; the combination of cognitions, feelings, and preparing to act towards a certain things is called individual s attitudes about that thing. Attitude is one of the effective factors on consumer behavior that has some characteristics. Then the formation of attitudes which takes place through four approaches (satisfying personal needs, collecting information about a specific subject, group belongingness or individual personality) is suggested; and finally, since by changing the attitude of variation, changing in behavior will be possible, there are some factors to change consumer attitudes. Keywords: Attitudes, Consumer Behavior; Persuasion; Encouragement; Advertisement 1. Introduction On the basis of researches which are performed during 21 th century, it is concluded that attitude has great influence on marketing and recognizing the consumer behavior. Attitude is the result of learning practice; people have specific attitude toward religion, politics, clothes, music, food, and almost everything. Human being has a pattern for his/her attitude, and changing such a pattern requires some modifications and adjustments that coping with them are too hard. According to this fact that consumer behavior is behaviors that consumer shows them, before, during and after purchasing a product or service, consumer attitudes toward a product or service that are going to buy and use them is a fundamental factor in forecasting and continuing consumer behavior; and attitude is the amount of passivity or having a sense of agreement or disagreement about a stimulus; in fact, stimuli are the emotional feelings that people have about phenomenon. (Gold et al, 2010) 2. Attitude Attitude is an applicable concept of social psychology, which has been popular since 1950 s. We have specific ideas about objects, individuals and thoughts that are resulting from our knowledge about them, our feeling toward them, and our willingness to react them. Such ideas often are determinant of a way that we deal with objects, individuals and thoughts. The combination of cognitions, feelings, and preparing to act towards a certain things is called individual s attitudes about that thing.(cutler& Armstrong,2005) Attitude is a stable system that includes a cognitive, emotional factor, and a willingness to act. Cognitive factor includes individual beliefs and ideas about a thought or object. Emotional or sentimental factor usually is the type of our emotional sense that links to our beliefs, and willingness to act is a tendency of preparing to respond through a particular style. (Setoodeh, 2010) Park suggests following four characteristic about attitude: 72

2 1. Attitude in dimension of objectives and values has a certain orientation, and from this perspective is differ from simple and conditional reflexes. 2. Attitude is not a daily and spontaneous behavior; on the contrary, it will show some tensions, even when it is hidden. 3. Attitude has different intensities. It is sometime dominant and another time is relatively ineffective. 4. Attitude is rooted in experience. Therefore it cannot be just a social instinct. 3. The Formation of Attitudes Attitudes are subjective characteristics of individuals that include the characteristics of social and physical world; and will achieve through experience; and is the result of training and learning. Some researchers believe that the factors of developing attitudes are these following four main factors: 1. 1.What satisfying the personal needs. For example, a student who despite all problems and difficulties continues education proves that he/she has a positive attitude towards education and studying (to satisfy the need of social approval). 2. Collecting information about a particular subject, object or person. For example, if someone has heard some discussions about nuclear energy through the media, he/she naturally will has some attitude toward that issue, and lack of information about it will cause, he/she has no attitude toward it. 3. Group belongingness. Child belonging to families as its member will cause that he/ she formulate an attitude similar the attitude of his /her family. 4. Individual personality. Attitude will reflect individual personality. For example, even in a group, there is attitudinal difference that is result of individual personality judgment. Researchers have shown that attitude will lead individual evaluate a product. And individual evaluation about something can incidence unconsciously that this individual judgment or perception depends on the person's attitude. Customer preference result from an attitude that he/she has toward a particular activity, social institution and/or idea, and attitude indicates the positive or negative sense about an object. Performed investigations show that the formation of attitude is affected by three following factors: 1. The way of acquiring attitude: attitude is acquiring through direct experience, exposure, classical conditioning, conditioned vicarious learning factor; social comparison. 2. Effective resources on formation of attitude: these resources include direct and previous experiences, friends and acquaintances, direct marketing and advertising. 3. Personality factors: personality plays an important role in formation of attitude. Individuals, who have high cognitive needs, more likely show a positive response toward awareness advertisement about a subject or a product. But, those who have low cognitive need probably show more positive attitude in response to emotional 73

3 advertising. As it can be seen, cognition, information and beliefs of customer about service, location, personnel, facilities and physical assets, management of operations, etc. can result in a positive attitude and developing a preference toward a product or a particular brand. One way of creating positive attitudes among customers is using advertisement. Emotions are effective on all aspect of attitudes, tendencies and desires. It is well- known that observing emotions is a common method of judging about decision making. People (Meloy) who have positive sense about something are less affected by negative information toward it. Therefore, emotion also is one of the factors that affect consumer behavior, which can divide it to three levels: 1. Emotions that have negative impact on behavior 2. Emotions that have positive impact on behavior. 3. Superhuman emotions that are distinction between two above levels. If, during considering a product to purchase, negative emotions arise in consumer, it will causes consumer avoid and reject purchasing; whereas emotions that have positive effect at the stage of considering a product to purchase will result in ongoing process of purchasing a product and consumer loyalty to a product with a specific brand(karimi,2011). 4. Changing Attitudes Since by changing attitude there will be the probability of changing individual s behavior, there should be special paying attention to it. Persuasion is a process in which we are trying to change others attitudes; in simple terms, it is attempt to change attitude. (Symon,2000) Persuasion means the process of directing people toward accepting an idea, attitude, or action, and will carry out by intellectual and symbolic means, which may are not reasonable, and through appealing to attractions, instead of using force and power. There is a question, what factors will make effective attempts towards persuasion and changing attitudes? These factors should be considered in order to have an effective persuasive message that change audience attitude, provide a new attitude, or reinforce the previous attitude: Using specialists The purpose of changing attitudes should be indirect. The price should be attractive. Sending message certainly should be unconsciously People who have lower self-esteem will convince more quickly When the attitude of audience is not similar to convincer s attitude, reciprocal messaging should be used. Emotional messages that are associated with fear, has a higher persuasiveness degree Persuasion theories mainly emphasize principles that at least have originated from one of three main schools of psychology, psychoanalysis, learning theory and cognitive approaches. The approach of psychoanalysis to persuasion has a unique characteristic that perhaps in aspect of public consciousness is one of most well-known persuasion theories, but probably has the least usage and application to professional advertisers; psychoanalysis theory of 74

4 persuasion in Vance Packard s famous advertising company by using the principles of psychoanalysis have developed advertisements that were dramatically strong and efficient.(fleur,2005) Learning theory: according to this theory, the message of persuasion once is persuasive that has learned and accepted by the receiver. Howland et al have divided learning theory into four stages: According to their point of view a message is persuasive when rewarding message recipient in each of following psychological stages: 1. Message has to attract recipient attention. 2. The reason of messages has to be understand 3. The message has to learn argument of message and accepts them as a fact. 4. We will as act based on these learning and beliefs, when, we have an incentive to perform them. Cognitive approach: In the late of 1960s, a new approach of persuasion that is called cognitive reaction approach has emerged to answer the questions and claims about learning theory. According to this theory, convincing the passive recipients of messages is not significant, but, what is considerable is attracting an active participant in the process of persuasion. Important determinant factors in persuasion is thoughts that are developing during seeing or hearing a persuasive in one's mind. In other words persuasion depends on the way of interpreting and reacting of receiver.(malhotra,2005) Influence and persuasion are concepts, which are very close to each other. When a resource deliberately attempts to change receivers thoughts, emotions and behavior there will be influence. Persuasion can be considered as a special case of influence. When a source applies communications consciously and tries to change audience attitudes, there will be persuasion. Influence and persuasion indicate deliberate changes but in practice, they differ from each other, because, persuasion requires communication (verbal and non-verbal messages) and looking for changing attitude, but, influence can occur without communication and will cause behavioral changes (external) without changes in attitude (internal). Attitude is individual s assessment of a mental attitude. Each person will make an assessment criterion (good and bad) and will judge issues according to them. (Meloy, 2010) Encouragement is a complicated, continuous process and has interaction characteristic, in which a sender and a receiver will related to each other by verbal or nonverbal symbols that through them, those who encouraging (encourager) try to influence those who will encouraged to accept a change in attitude or behavior. Encouragement is a mutual process in which both parties or groups will be close to a message - event and are applying them to an attempt to meet the requirements, as a result the audience is never considered passive; he/she is an active audience, who are looking for encouragers to removing and satisfying his/her demands; and the other one is an actively encourager, who knows should paying attention to the needs of the audience and by adopting a certain goal and message respond to his/her needs. In general, we can say that the audience reaction toward persuasive messages can appear in three forms: 75

5 1. Formulating reaction: it is like learning. When the teacher as an encourager is trying to teach a certain behavior to student and is trying by reward help reinforcing that behavior of audience, reaction will formulate in student. If audience reactions consistent with what encourager has desired through rewarding formation of positive attitudes about what is learned will expand 2. Reinforcing reaction: if audience her/himself has a positive attitude toward a subject, encourager helps reinforcing these attitudes by notifying them. Nowadays, in our society, encouragement is from reinforcing type more than others. 3. Changing reaction: it is the most difficult type of persuasion and encouragement because it deals with this problem that people desire to transfer from an attitude to another one, from a neutral attitude to positive or negative one, from changing behavior to adopting new behaviors. People are reluctant to change and variation or are unwilling about it. In this case, encourager, from a domain that audience already accepted it will develop a link to a new domain and in this way will related them to each other as an "anchor. For example advertisement can be used to change the consumer s attitude. In general, advertisement in a general sense, is conveying messages to others through communication, in order to make changes and variations in audience knowledge, attitude and behavior, which is based on three factors of message receiver (audience), message sender (media) and the content of message. It should be m acknowledged that in advertisement just conveying an idea is not the end of action, but, persuasion and encouragement also to achieve certain targets is considerable. The most general meaning of advertisement is the technique of influencing human action through symbols that may be spoken, written, video or musical. 5. Conclusion: Individual s attitude is an important factor in their behavior and in consumer behavior, in order to change behavior, changing individual s attitude about several items such as advertisement, sales promotion, etc. Toward goal it is possible (for example increasing sales), however it should be mention that changing in attitude is not permanent and it is temporary. Therefore by using consumer attitude, forecasting her/his behavior is possible, and to change the behavior, changing his/her attitude with regard to items such as advertising and, etc. will be used. Resources Cutler, P & Armstrong, G. (2005). Principles of Marketing, translated by Ali Parsian,Tehran, Adabstan publisher, 231 to, p 230 Fleur, J.M. L & Jan-Benedict E.M. (2005). Steenkamp;p (Emotions in consumer behavior: a hierarchical approach) Gold, J and Kolb, W.( 2009). Dictionary of Social Sciences, Kia, Tehran, Maziar Publishing, First Edition,.Page862 Karimi, Y. (2011), social psychology, Tehran Beast, First Edition, p 295 and p

6 Malhotra Naresh,K. (2005), Attitude and affect: new frontiers of research in the 21st century, p ( Business Research 58) Meloy, M. (2010). The power of affect: predicting intention;p (Consumer Research Setoodeh, H. (2010). a... The efficacy of social psychology, light, sound Tehran, third edition, p. 147 Symon, John and Minor, M and Rftarmsrf, S.(2000). a competent translator Ardestani, published Asar. 77