Page 41 - DMGT506_CONSUMER_BEHAVIOUR

Consumer Behaviour

Notes March 1976) presented a more comprehensive list of 16 motive categories. He first divides
motivation into four main categories based on two criteria:
1. Cognitive or affective motivation.

2. Preservation or growth motivation.
Cognitive motives focus on a person's need for maintaining a coherent and organised
view of the world to achieve a sense of meaning. Affective motives deal with the need to
reduce or avoid any tension and accomplish satisfying feeling states and achieve personal
goals.
Preservation-oriented motives focus on trying to maintain balance, and growth motives
relate to personal development.
These four principal categories are further subdivided on the bases of motivation source
and motivation objective.
3. Is the behaviour proactive or a reaction to something in the environment?
4. Is the behaviour helping to attain a new internal state or a new external relationship to the
environment?
The third criterion differentiates between internally aroused motives and motives aroused in
response to circumstances. The fourth criterion helps distinguish outcomes that are internal to
the individual and those concerned with relationship with the environment. Table 3.1 lists all
the motives as classified by McGuire.

Table 3.1: McGuire's Classification of Motives

Active Passive
(Proactive) (Reactive)
Cognitive Preservation 1. Consistency 2. Attribution 3. 4. Objectification
(Thinking) Categorisation
Growth 5. Autonomy 6. Stimulation 7. Matching 8. Utilitarian
Affective Preservation 9. Tension 10. Self -expression 11. Ego Defence 12. Reinforcement
(Feeling) Reduction
Growth 13. Assertion 14. Affiliation 15. Identification 16. Modelling

Cognitive Preservation Motives

Consistency Need (active, internal): This need focuses on maintaining a consistent and coherent
view of oneself and the world. These aspects include beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, opinions,
self-images, and view of others etc. Reduction of cognitive dissonance is a common motive of
this category.
Attribution Need (active, external): This need focuses on understanding and inferring causes for
various occurrences. Humans have a tendency to attribute causes of success to self and
unfavourable outcomes to some outside causes or forces. Attribution theory attempts to explain
consumers' need to attribute who or what causes the things that happen.

Categorisation Need (passive, internal): Consumers have a need to categorise complex
information in order to organise and understand it easily. There is too much information and
almost every day we are exposed to new experiences, so we have need to establish distinct
categories that facilitate processing large amounts of information.

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