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Retail Business Environment

Notes Since a consumer holds many beliefs, it may often be difficult to get down to a "bottom
line" overall belief about whether an object such as McDonald's is overall good or bad.
2. Affect: Consumers also hold certain feelings toward brands or other objects. Sometimes
these feelings are based on the beliefs (e.g., a person feels nauseated when thinking about
a hamburger because of the tremendous amount of fat it contains), but there may also be
feelings which are relatively independent of beliefs. For example, an extreme
environmentalist may believe that cutting down trees is morally wrong, but may have
positive affect toward Christmas trees because he or she unconsciously associates these
trees with the experience that he or she had at Christmas as a child.

3. Behavioral Intention: The behavioral intention is what the consumer plans to do with
respect to the object (e.g., buy or not buy the brand). As with affect, this is sometimes a
logical consequence of beliefs (or affect), but may sometimes reflect other circumstances–
e.g., although a consumer does not really like a restaurant, he or she will go there because
it is a hangout for his or her friends.
(a) Attitude-Behavior Consistency: Consumers often do not behave consistently with their
attitudes for several reasons:

1. Ability: He or she may be unable to do so. Although junior high school student
likes pick-up trucks and would like to buy one, she may lack a driver's license.
2. Competing demands for resources: Although the above student would like to buy
a pickup truck on her sixteenth birthday, she would rather have a computer,
and has money for only one of the two.

3. Social influence: A student thinks that smoking is really cool, but since his
friends think it's disgusting, he does not smoke.
4. Measurement problems: Measuring attitudes is difficult. In many situations,
consumers do not consciously set out to enumerate how positively or
negatively they feel about mopeds, and when a market researcher asks them
about their beliefs about mopeds, how important these beliefs are, and their
evaluation of the performance of mopeds with respect to these beliefs,
consumers often do not give very reliable answers. Thus, the consumers may
act consistently with their true attitudes, which were never uncovered because
an erroneous measurement was made.
(b) Attitude Change Strategies: Changing attitudes is generally very difficult, particularly
when consumers suspect that the marketer has a self-serving agenda in bringing
about this change (e.g., to get the consumer to buy more or to switch brands).
1. Changing affect: One approach is to try to change affect, which may or may not
involve getting consumers to change their beliefs. One strategy uses the
approach of classical conditioning try to "pair" the product with a liked stimulus.
For example, we "pair" a car with a beautiful woman. Alternatively, we can try
to get people to like the advertisement and hope that this liking will "spill
over" into the purchase of a product. For example, the Pillsbury Doughboy
does not really emphasize the conveyance of much information to the
consumer; instead, it attempts to create a warm, fuzzy image. Although
Energizer Bunny ads try to get people to believe that their batteries last longer,
the main emphasis is on the likeable bunny. Finally, products which are better
known, through the mere exposure effect, tend to be better liked–that is, the
more a product is advertised and seen in stores, the more it will generally be
liked, even if consumers to do not develop any specific beliefs about the
product.

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