Attitudes And Intentions, Dealing With The Consumer

4 Pages 1116 Words

Attitudes and Intentions, Dealing with the Consumer

Attitudes and intentions have always been a major part of the marketers’ research.
Attitudes, a person’s overall evaluation of a concept, is used in the integration process to see how an object is thought of and viewed. Intentions also determine most voluntary behaviors. Measures of consumers’ intentions may not be perfect indicators of the actual intentions that determine the behavior. Throughout this paper, I will discuss the relationship between attitudes and intentions and the part they both play on the marketing plan.
Attitude has been called “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.” (Fishbein 1-19) And it is one of the most important concepts marketers use to understand consumers. This is because marketers have been able to use attitudes as key tools in the research process. Over the years, researchers have tried a variety of approaches to studying attitudes in an attempt to provide a more complete understanding of behavior. This behavior of consumers has thought to be strategically dependent on the attitudes of the consumers. Although the dominant approach to attitudes has changed over the years, nearly all definitions of attitude have one thing in common: they all refer to a person’s overall evaluation of a concept. (Fazio 204-43)
Evaluations are affective responses at relatively low levels of intensity and arousal, created by both the affective and cognitive systems. The affective system automatically produces affective responses – including emotions, feelings, moods, and evaluations or attitudes – as immediate, direct responses to certain stimuli. These stimuli may or may not affect the response, depending on the environment at which the test is being performed. The cognitive processing model of consumer decision making shows that an overall evaluation is formed when consumers combine knowledge, meani...