Lecture Fourteen: Involvement and Values

In this weeks lecture our aim was to:

• Understand how a person's level of involvement and degree of involvement (High/Low)affects their behaviour.


• Understand how a person's values affects their behaviour.

and finally

• Consider how Marketers can exploit this??

Consumer Involvement

Involvement is defined as - "A person's perceived relevance of the object based on their inherent needs, values, and interests"
Judith Lynne Zaichkowsky. (December 1985) Measuring the involvement construct in marketing, journal of consumer research 12: 341-52.

In the quote above, the word Object is used very loosely because the object can be anything from a product, brand or advertisement. Now from this there are 2 levels of involvement when a consumer purchases something:


High Involvement Purchase

• A high involvement purchase is a product like a car or a house where the consumer is going to be really considering all the finer points. For example you wouldn't just go and buy a house for say £500,000 because it has 4 walls, a roof and a floor. You would expect decent sized bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms and something extra that makes it worth while. When a consumer becomes involved at this level they are moving from 'Inertia' to 'Passion' and the consumer will almost become obsessed with the purchase.
  
  This also means that they will take at lot more time to make a decision, so it's a marketers job to really capture the imagination this potential consumer before the consumer even knows that they are going to make a purchase. This can be in the form of a consumer seeing a car ad in his teens and holding that dream until he can afford to buy one. Then when he has the money he will only come to you, by this time you will have a new, maybe more expensive model which he buys instead. Easy. I wish.
  
  Below is Philip Kotler's 'Buyer Decision Process' Model and the reason i have included it here is because it ties in with the high involvement purchase taking a long time. This model is supposed to be relevant to all purchase decisions but I would say that it mainly shows how consumers think during a high involvement purchase. Simply no one is going to go through all the stages when buying a chocolate bar or a tin of beans but they will when buying a house or car.
  

Low Involvement Purchase

• A low involvement purchase comes down to the level that is almost second nature to consumers. This includes most basic needs like food (beans, bread, eggs etc) which will not require the consumer to be very involved. The consumer at this level will simply lack the motivation to consider alternatives even if they may be cheaper one time, they just wont pay attention.

Below is a model which show the level of involvement in different purchase decisions from low to high:



I think this mini-model is a really good way of showing the types of purchases and where they belong in the involvement scale. So what do they mean:

• Routine - This is something that you will always buy because you need it, it becomes routine, just do it.


• Impulse - This is like a pair of shoes, you see them in the window, go in, buy them and think about it later. Spur of the moment, completely irregular.


• Routine - This will involve something that you buy regularly but don't necessarily need, like a newspaper or your morning coffe from Starbucks.


• Irregular(small) - This will be be at the higher end of the involvement scale because it takes some thought about the purchase. An engagement ring is a good example because it is a big purchase with high involvement but it's not as big of a purchase as a house.


• Irregular(large) - This will be the house, the car, the yacht and will be at the highest end of the scale with the consumer, as i have said before, becoming obsessed.

Measuring Involvement

Measuring involvement is a very useful marketing tool because you gain information about how a consumer reacts to an object. Solomon et al (2006) points out that if a TV viewer is more involved in a program they are more likely to pay attention the the ads in between. The pioneers in measuring involvement are Laurent & Kapferer (1985) who state "A consumer's level of involvement will be affected by four deciding factors." These are:

Importance of Risk(also know as 'Harvard Perceived Risk Model' or 'FTEPS)



Finance (How much does it cost.)


Time (How long of a window do you have to buy.)


Performance (Will the product do what it's supposed to do.)


Ego (How will it make you feel about yourself.)


Physical (How does it look/feel, is it safe.)


Social (How will other people think about you.)






Probability of making a bad purchase




Pleasure value of product category




Sign value of product category(symbolism)

From these four deciding factors Laurent & Kapferer then created a table of random products and scored them. The ones with the higher numbers were the products that the consumer was most involved in. These scores were ordered by Interest, Pleasure, Sign/Status, Imporisk(Importance of perceived risk.) and Proberr (Probability of making an erroneous or wrong choice.). Below is the table mentioned above:



To add to this they came up with 4 levels of involvement and how the consumers brain works, they are:

• Low: Think-Do-Feel - Tinned Beans.


• Behavioural: Do-Think-Feel - Clothes.


• Impuse: Feel-Do-Think - Chocolate.


• High: Think-Feel-Do - Car or House.

Values

"Generically speaking, a value can be defined as a belief about some desirable end-state that transcends specific situations and guides selection of behaviour."
Shalom H. Schwartz &Warren Bilsky. (1987) Toward a universal psychological structure of human values, journal of personality and social Psychology 53: 550-62.

One of the main things is not to get values and attitudes mixed up because they are not the same; yes they are the basis of how we behave in a situation but generally values are not specific to one situation. This is a very complex area when it comes to understanding the customer because two people may have the same values but for different reasons. For example if 2 men go to the gym for the simple reason to keep fit, so health reasons. However the first man is purely going to look good and he may then stop whereas the second man is there to train for a marathon. This can apply to anything but there is one person - Lynn R. Kahle who came up with 'Kahle's List of Values' which is a smaller, subsidised version of the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). It includes the values:

• Self Respect


• Excitement


• Being well Respected


• Self-Fulfilment


• Sense of Acomplishment


• Warm Relationship with Others


• Security


• Fun & Enjoyment


• Sense of Belonging

However the List of Values (LOV) is seen as a bit of a cheap, knock off version RVS or (VALS) Values and Lifestyle Survey.

See if you can prioritise these in order of importance to you. I couldn't do it, in fact most people can't; this highlights another problem that the values list is a list of values that most of us use day by day, there is no real distinction between them. This is why the RVS and VALS are more popular. The best you are likely to do with this list is pick the main one or two that you think rule over the others. Mine are Self-Fulfilment, becoming the best I can be and a equal mix of warm relationship with others and fun & excitement.

In our lecture we also talked about time lines to highlight the fact that peoples values will differ on their age because of for example an 80 year old woman is more likely to do everything for her husband because in the 50's etc woman's place was seen to be in the home but a 20 year old has grown up in a world with feminist groups and equal rights for men and woman becoming stronger. I am now going to show you my time line which as of Friday will be 20 years.