Consumer Behavior and Motivation

These flashcards cover key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture on consumer behavior and motivation.

Motivation

The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.

Motive

An internal, unobservable force that drives action.

McGuire’s Psychological Motives

More specific to consumer behavior, and organizes motives into 16 categories, the categories ultimately split into two different ways

Consumer Buyer Behavior

The study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs.

Cognitive Motives

Motives that focus on adapting to an environment and achieving a sense of meaning through thinking, learning, and problem solving.

Affective Motives

Motives that deal with the need to feel satisfied and obtain personal goals, focusing on emotions and feelings.

Preservation-oriented Motivation

Motivation aimed at maintaining stability, consistency, and the status quo.

Growth-oriented Motivation

Motivation that focuses on self-improvement, personal development, and change.

Active Response (I)

motivations are internally initiated

Passive Response

motivations arise in response to the environment or circumstances

Internal Behavior

These behaviors help achieve an outcome associated with the individual 

External Behavior

These behaviors help achieve an outcome focused on a relationship with the environment

Manifest Motives

Motives that are freely admitted by consumers and are clear and direct in their appeal.

Latent Motives

Motives that are either unknown to the consumer or that the consumer is reluctant to admit, often leading to indirect appeal.

Approach-Approach Conflict

A conflict that arises when choosing between two equally desirable options.

Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict

A conflict where a consumer must choose between two unattractive options.

Approach-Avoidance Conflict

A conflict involving a single option that has both positive and negative attributes.

Personality

An individual's characteristic response tendencies across similar situations.

Trait Theories

Theories that suggest all individuals have internal traits related to action tendencies and that measurable differences exist between individuals.

Multi-Trait Approach

Identifies several traits that in combination capture a substantial portion of the individual, most common is the five-factor model

Five-Factor Model

A personality model categorizing traits into five dimensions: (EIAOC)

Extroversion, Instability, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness.

• Extroversion: prefers to be in a group, talkative with others, bold 

• Instability: emotionally reactive, prone to stress and anxiety 

• Agreeableness: sympathetic, kind to others, “go along, get along”  

• Open to experience: imaginative, appreciate of art, finds novel solutions

• Conscientiousness: Organized, disciplined, goal-oriented, and reliable 

Single Trait Approach

emphasize one personality trait as being particularly relevant to understanding behavior

Single Trait Theories (ECU)

• Consumer Ethnocentrism: how much someone believes it is “right” to buy products made in their own country and “wrong” to buy foreign product

  • High Ethnocentrism = buys domestic products

  • Low Ethnocentrism = buys foreign products

• Need for Cognition: Reflects on a consumer’s engagement and thinking.  Consumers high in NFC enjoy thinking and processing information deeply. They respond better to detailed, fact-based messages

• Need for Uniqueness: These consumers value scarce, distinctive, or exclusive products.

Consumer Ethnocentrism - Single Trait Theory

The belief that it is ‘right’ to buy products made in one's own country and ‘wrong’ to buy foreign products.

Need for Cognition

People with high NFC individuals enjoying deep processing. They respond better to detailed fact based messages. Women have high NFCs

NFC = engagement level of thinking and processing information

Need for Uniqueness

A consumer's desire to differentiate oneself through consumption, valuing scarce or distinctive products.

Brand Personality

A set of human characteristics associated with a brand, influencing consumer perception.

Emotion

Strong, relatively uncontrolled feelings that influence behavior and are linked to needs, motivation, and personality.

Perception

The process through which individuals perceive, transform, and store information.

Brand Personalities: 5 Dimensions

1. Sincerity 

2. Excitement 

3. Competence 

4. Sophistication 

5. RuggednessM

Mechanisms used to develop brand personalities

• Celebrity endorsers

• User imagery (showing typical users and their habits)

  • This allows for potential customers see themselves as users of the product

• Executional factors (music, tone, pacing, visuals)

The process which we receive, transform and store information (4)

1. Exposure

2. Attention

3. Interpretation

4. Adaptation

Exposure

A stimulus enters the consumer’s sensory field

1. Selective: ad avoidance, muting ads 

One way marketers try to go around ad avoidance is product placement within movies, video game properties, etc. 

2. Voluntary exposure: opting to follow a brand or receive promotional texts ex: watching the super bowl ads

Attention

The consumer allocates mental resources to the stimulus.

1. Stimulus: physical characteristics, size color, position 

2. Individual: characteristics that distinguish from each other, motivation and ability

3. Situation: other stimuli in the environment ex: crowds or long lines, crowd clutter

*Subliminal Stimuli: a message presented so quickly or quietly that consumers are not aware of their presence, unlikely to have an impact

Interpretation

The consumer assigns meaning to the stimulus.Relative process influenced by one’s own experiences and reference points 

Because interpretation is relative, it is subject to individual bias 

1. Semantic meaning: The objective, dictionary definition of a message.

2. Psychological meaning: The subjective meaning shaped by personal experiences, culture, and context.

Cognitive vs Affective Interpretation

1. Cognitive: a process where stimuli are placed into existing categories of meaning 

2. Affective: the emotional feeling or response triggers by a marketing stimulus 

How a consumer interprets a marketing stimulus is determined by three factors

• Individual: inherit traits, learning and knowledge, expectations

• Stimulus: size, shape, color 

  • Stimulus organization refers to the physical arrangement of the objects 

• Situation: mood, colors used in the stimulus, surroundings 

Twilight Zone

The transition zone is the first 5–15 feet inside a store entrance where consumers are adjusting physically and mentally. Shoppers are not yet ready to process information, so signage and promotions placed here are often ignored.

JND: Just Noticeable Difference

JND is the smallest change in a stimulus that consumers can detect. Marketers use JND strategically:

• To keep price increases unnoticed

• To ensure product improvements are noticeable

Short-Term Memory (STM)

Temporary storage with limited capacity used for active processing of information. Limited capacity (5–9 items), temporary, used for active processing

Strategies to Improve STM Capacity

• Repetition

• Chunking

• Organization of information

Long-Term Memory (LTM)

Unlimited capacity storage for knowledge, experiences, and emotions, remembered long-term.There are 3 types of LTM

• Semantic Memory

• Episodic Memory

• Flashbulb Memory

LTM Semantic Memory

Basic knowledge and feelings about a concept, representing a fundamental understanding. (ex: Honda is a car manufacture)

Episodic Memory

Memory of sequences of events that an individual has personally experienced. (Ex: A milestone life event such as graduation)

Flashbulb Memory

A vivid and detailed memory of the circumstances surrounding a surprising event. (ex: remembering an exciting event)

****Two important memory structures are schemas and scripts

Schemas

• Cognitive structures that represent knowledge about concepts or objects.

  • Concepts acquire depth of meaning by being associated with other concepts 

  • A pattern of such association is called a schema 

  • They consist of personal opinions, and experiences, and objective fact based information. 

Scripts

• Scripts: Knowledge structures that represent sequences of events or behaviors.

  • Helps individuals perform routine consumption tasks effectively 

    • Ex: bruising teeth or sorting recycling

Involvement in Learning

The level of motivation a consumer has towards learning material, influencing the depth of processing.

High involvement Learning

• situation in which the consumer is motivated to learn the material.  Leads to cognitive learning, analytical reasoning, and deeper processing.

Low involvement Learning

• situation in which a consumer has little to no motivation to learn the material. Leads to learning through repetition and conditioning.

Classical Conditioning

• Learning through association between stimuli; common in low-involvement situations.

Unconditioned stimuli: Sound of classical music, sight of food when hungry 

Unconditioned response: Feeling of relaxation, increased salivation 

Ex: using music and nostalgia to evoke emotions are two typical approach to classical conditioning in marketing 

Operant Conditioning (AKA Instrumental Learning)

Learning through reinforcement of behaviors, more common in high-involvement situations.Ex: reward points in an app (CFA, Starbucks, Duolingo)

Cognitive Learning

Encompasses mental activities to solve problems or cope with situations without direct experience.

There are 3 types of cognitive learning

• Iconic route learning: learning a concept or the association between two or more without conditioning. Ex: Arby's “We have the Meats”

• Vicarious learning (modeling): Consumers do not need to directly experience a reward or punishment to learn the consequences of behavior, they can simply observe the outcomes of others to learn.

• Analytical reasoning: Requires individuals to restructure and combine existing and new information to form associations and concepts.

Retrieval Failure = forgetting

When the information can’t be recalled from long-term memory, often due to memory interference.

Strength of Learning

How easily we are able to access, or retrieve, information from LTM is partially determined by strength of learning 

Learning is strengthened through:

• Importance: the value that customers place on the information learned. It increases elaboration, strengthens learning, and distinguishes high- from low-involvement situations.

• Message Involvement: Evoking the sense, playing music, and eliciting an emotional response are ways to increase message involvement. Brands can also use self-referencing, in which the consumers can relate the marketing information to themselves.   

• Mood: positive mood creates stronger linkages between brands and concepts and enhances the likelihood of retrieval from LTM   

• Reinforcement: Reinforcement increases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated and strengthens how quickly and how well information is learned and remembered.

• Repetition: increases accessibility and strengthens association. The more you are exposed to information, the more likely you are to remember it 

• Dual coding (verbal + visual): learning the same information in different contexts: Ex: Geico gecko and the geico caveman. Can also relate to information being stored in different memory modes, such as verbal, visual, or auditory.  

Attitude

An enduring organization of motivational, emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes towards an aspect of the environment.

Attitudes are learned

Consist of 3 Components

1. Cognitive (how we think)

2. Affective (how we feel)

3. Behavioral (how we act)

Cognitive

• consumer’s beliefs and thoughts about a product, consist of perceived emotional benefits of consuming a product and objective features and functionality 

  • **It is important for marketers to distinguish between 

    • product features: are objective and nonevaluative  (ex: 5 mg of sodium for serving) 

    • product benefits: evaluative in nature and may be mashed on more subjective criteria (ex: low sodium products are better for your health) 

Affective

• Feelings and emotional responses toward a product.

  • Utilitarian and hedonic product benefits 

    • Utilitarian benefits: Functional, practical, problem-solving.

*If it helps you solve a problem or complete a task, it’s utilitarian.

• Ex: toothpaste: prevents cavities, whitens teeth

• Hedonic benefits: Emotional, sensory, pleasure-oriented.

*If it’s about pleasure, enjoyment, or emotions, it’s hedonic.

• Ex: perfume or cologne: makes you feel attractive, boost confidence 

Central Route

A method of attitude change involving deep processing and strong, stable attitudes.

Peripheral Route

A method of attitude change based on reliance on peripheral cues (celebrity, music) and weaker attitudes.

• The competitive context also plays a role in whether or not peripheral cues could become relevant under high involvement 

  • Ex: two or more brands have comparable product features or functionality, consumers may use peripheral cues as a tiebreaker

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

A theory explaining how attitudes are formed and changed under varying conditions of involvement.

Appeals used by Marketers to influence attitude change 

• Fear: negative consequences, unsafe behavior (ex: texting and driving)  

• Humorous: used to increase liking

• Comparative Ads: directly compare the features or benefits of two or more brands 

• Spokeschafters/ Celebrity Endorsement: Jake from State Farm 

• Sponsorship: