Involvement - How much time, thought, energy and other resources people devote to the purchase process. (taken from, http://www.adcracker.com/involvement/)
Values - "If we believe our values drive our behaviour, then we should be concentrating on the important, underlyng motives that drive consumers to make product or servce choices rather than simply product attributes." (Ries and Trout 1982)
If values are said to drive our behaviour, then in marketing terms, it would appear that we would base all our purchasing decisions on these principals; but is this the case?
For me personally, my values have altered over the years throughout my life, major events, experiences, family and friends are amongst the factors that have the biggest impact on what I base my values on. Family shapes my values on security and sense of belonging, friends impact on my values of warm relationships with others. Major events such as changes in the family home has impacted my values on security, and my experiences of going travelling have changed my values on my sense of acomplishment and self respect. With only being on the planet for 20 years, im sure my values are set to change again and again as I pass through more life stages!
Relating this theory to marketing, my idea that values change over time may suggest that the way in which we make purchases may also change over time. This may be due to values changing with regards to how your money is spent, or with values based on lifestyle.
The VALS test is an online survey used as a marketing and consulting tool for businesses wantng to improve ther strategies. I took the VALS test (Values, Attitudes, Lifestyles test) to look at what type of attitudes I tend to base the way I work on. After completing several questons, I found that I am a striver (trendy and fun loving, motivated by achievement, and always concerned about the opinion and approval of others!). In terms of purchasing, being a striver means that I am an active onsumer. This is because I see shopping as both a social occassion as well as an opportunity to demonstrate to my peers the ability to buy ( is this me?!) I also am as impulsive as my financial circumstance will allow ( No way!!). My "Striver" approach to life is supported by being an achiever. (To take the test yourself: http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/5-4.shtml)
For me, the amount of thought that is put into gift giving is dependent on who the gift is for, and what kind of present is in mind. To buy a pair of socks would require a different level of thought and involvement (absolutly zero for me!) compared with buying an expensive piece of jewellery or a new mobile phone or computer.
It seems that mainly items of higher value and interest to the purchaser will be an involved decision as there are more risks involved with the purchase. This can be described by Laurent and Kapferer (1985) who argue there are 4 components that affect a consumers purchasing decision.
1. Importance and Risk. FTPEPS - Finance, Time, Performance, Ego, Physical and Social.
2. The probability of making a bad purchase (the product may not work, or there may be a problem).
3. Pleasure value of product category ( enjoyment in purchase transaction).
4. Sign value of product category (What will others think of the product; will they make an assumpton about you based on the product?) A present that is always somewhere on a girl's christmas or birthday wish list is perfume. Laurent and Kapferer use a number scale to rate the level of involvement put into buyng different products. Perfume rates very highly across all components affecting consumer decisions, indicating that buying perfume is a highly involved process. This may be because of pricing; perfumes can be fairly expensive, so wanting the best for your money will be important, especially in this economical climate. Another factor that would affect the purchase of a perfume may be the worry of making a bad purchase - will the recipent like the scent, will your choice of perfume for others send out a message about you, and will it be a positive one or a negative one?
Looking at a scale based on Kotlers Buyer Decision process, it is stated that the more often you buy a product (routine based items such as coffee, loo paper), the less involvement. This is due to the fact they that they are bought on a regular basis so no thought it needed in the decision process. Items however that are bought infrequently require a high amount of involvement because it will not be a purchase that you are used to making. For christmas, my brother wanted a popcorn maker, a product that I had never bought before in my life! This meant that there was a lot of involvement because I wanted to look around at the different options so to get the best I could for my money. I visited a range of different shops and asked shop assistants probably really stupd questions, but it was because ths was a product that was alien to me, therefore I needed to to put more involvement into the process than I would have done if I were buying him a Wii game etc. One of the main factors affecting purchasing decsions currently, whether it be for a gift or for a regular purchase, is value. People are wanting to spend less but obtain the same results for their money. Different products have different features that helo to drive the value of that product. It could be the functionality...something that can be utilised. It could be that the product is symbolic, either through its branding or its image; giving the consumer that extra reason to choose their product over another. Finally the purchase could be hedonistic, involving a sense of fun. For instance, my dad will always buy my brother and separate silly presents at christmas, last christmas I got given a mini Henry desk hoover...a little dig at me for never dusting! This gift would therefore fall nto the funxtional category as well as the hedonistic category.
Danziger (2004) states that the process of gift giving creates an emotional connection between the purchaser and receiver. He sees the element of emotion as the main factor affecting decision making, the ultimate goal of purchasing gifts to result in a special feeling, both by the purchaser and the receiver. Danziger looks at the gift as a symbol of a message wanted to be portrayed to the receiver. This can be demonstrated by taking champagne as an example; if you receive champagne as a gift, it normally gives out the message of celebration. If the giver and recipient's value drivers differ however, this can lead to problems in the emotional connection and message sent out.
This theory of emotion affecting purchases supports the fact that gift selection is right brain dominated, the emotional side of the brain. The selection of the store to get the gift from however, is decided from the left side of the brain, the rational thinking side. This has a big impact on marketing as it is is the experience of the shopping experience in the particular shop that will affect whether the customer will return or not. Some shops will try to create a more enjoyable shopping experience by offering extra unpaid for extras such as wrapping the product and placing it in elegant looking bags; making the purchase feel special, creating an emotional connection with the purchaser before the gift has even been given to the receiver.
"In the real world, making a good decision is not mostly about choosing the best option. A good decision means choosing an option that works and allows you to move quickly onto whatever you want to do next." Tim Williams (taken from WARC)
Kotler's Buyer Decision Process assumes optimisation rather than satisfaction, but in terms of buying heuristically (buying quickly with not much thought), it is not optimisation that is focused on, but satisfaction. When we go to a supermarket, we do not tend to look for optimisation, we tend to make judgements on what product has satisfied us in the past (done through referring to memories).
The simplest heuristic is recognition. If there is an option of a recognised brand versus an unknown brand, the recognised brand would probably be chosen. An example could be my mum going food shopping each week and returning mostly with the same brands every time. This backs up the idea that if she has been satisfied by a product previously, she will purchase that product heuristically again and again. This seems to be a safeguard; stick to the product you know and like rather than going for the unknown and being disappointed.
Memory
"Learning is the acquisition of knowledge. Memory is the storage of internal representation of that knowledge." Blakemore 1988.
Everytime an advert or commercial appears, the objective is for the viewer to learn something and remember it. This is obviously crucial, if viewers do not remember what advertisments are promoting, the brand is at a loss. This concept relates back to researching into what target audiences are most likely to take interest in (e.g. humour and simplicity for males and detals for women).
Memory affects different stages of Kotler's buyer decision process, the information search and evaluation of alternatives. When a product is being purchased, the consumer will go back and retrieve information from their long term memory regarding past experiences and thoughts. If the experience of the product was satisfactory or above, the informaton search probably would not be considered, however, if past experiences suggested the product was below satisfactory, an alternative brand may be chosen.
Nostalgia
"A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in ones life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends. It is a sentimental yearning for the happiness for a former time or place."
"When a stimulus is capable of recreating a personal event, even after many years, there often follows a bitter sweet feeling of nostalgia." Dubois 2000.
"Nostalgia has been described as a bitter sweet emotion, where the past is both viewed with sadness and longing." Solomon 2000.
Nostalgia is used frequently by advertisers to remind and take their veiwers back to the prime time of their lives. One company that is especially renound for the use of nostalgia in their adverts is Marks and Spencers; they have used both music and image to create nostalgia, as well as iconic faces such as Twiggy. By using certain music, a feeling of happiness can be achieved through triggering memories from the particualr era. This ultimately creates a positive link between the nostalgic memories and the product being advertised.
To test the effects of nostalgia myself, I have conducted a short interview with my mum and taken her back to the early 80's where she would have been in her early 20's...the age that is supposed to be the prime of your life! The video starts off fairly calmly, but towards the end A LOT of editing had to be carried out as mum got rather carried away...the nostalgic feeling for her got a bit too exciting!!
It is fairly obvious from this diagram, that the male and female brain definitly work in different ways! For a marketer or advertisor, it is therefore vital to look into the most effective way of getting target audiences to respond, whether it be a male or a female.
When taking a test to discover my brain's "Sex I.D", found that my brain worked largely in a female orientated way, but showing some male orientated thinking patterns. When carryng out a certain part of the test, I found out that the right side of my brain is my dominant side. The right sde of the brain is said to be more adept at language, logic and linear thinkng, whereas the left side of the brain is responsible for controlling visual, spatial and intuitve processes. Another part of the brain test showed that I scored 15 out of 20 when calculating how empathetic I am (showing how I respond to other's emotions). When calculating my systemising score, I only gained 3 out of 20 points, this would suggest that I do not enjoy exploring the intricacies of systems e.g. putting together flat pack furniture!!
Research has shown that females tend to respond more to emotions, details and the use of language. Males on the other hand are more responsive to humour, statistcs and facts.
This Stella Artois advert directed at the male audience uses humour to portray it's message; it implies a James Bond type scenario, making men associate the brand with an iconic (?) character.
This advert shown from the NSPCC has been reported to have gained most of it's donations from a female audience. This relates back to the theory that women respond to emapthy. Another audience that these types of adverts may have a greater impact on may be mothers; an audience that would deeply empathise wth an advert such as this one.
Schiebe and Condry (1984) examined advertisments according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in the advertisments. They found that advertisments aimed at women focused on stressing beauty and youth, whereas the adverts aimed at males emphasised on ambition and physical strength.
When looking at a case study regarding how direct mail is used, it was interesting to see how different writing styles resulted in very different results. Charities tend to use an emotoional female orientated writing style. When researchers re-wrote a certain charity mail shot to make it more masculine and factual, there was an 85% increase in responses from men. When sending this more factual mail shot out to women, there was a 15% decrease in response when comapared with the original emotional version.
Feedback from males and females show that women prefer a more collaberative and conversational style of writing whereas males are annoyed by a chatty style and preferred hard data and facts, as well as concise language. It was also found that women prefer strong colours and evocative images, whereas images were unimportant to males and the use of colours did not generate much interest.
The first session that I attended was all about 'what's next'? This was a question and answer event held by a panel of experts in their field. Speakers included Allan Rich, Jamie Matthews, Ivor Peters, Andrew Canter, Don Cowley, Steve Cox, Jayne Barr and Rob Lawrence. The speakers came from a variety of sectors from PR agencies through to advertising and media.
The session was focused on two main factors, the impact of the environment and the current recession. Most of the panel agreed that the credit crunch should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat. Allan Rich explained how instead of having to cut back on expenditure, the budgets should be focused purely on your brands that have the potential or guarantee to have the best successful outcome. Instead of splitting the budget between 10 brands, focus the money on 1 or 2. This means more time and effort can be spent in those brands that already have the loyalty and awareness...the brands that people will keep going back to.
Jamie Matthews spoke about the constant change in power for methods of marketing communications, currently our society is moving towards digital marketing, but in a few years, the power may have shifted and digital will no longer be the mest method of communicating your message.
Jamie also stated how CONTACT and CONTENT in an advert needs to be spot on. It is crucial to place the message where it is going to be seen by your target audience, and it is also essential that the message given in the advert has an impact and is memorable.
In order for a brand to be successful, Ivor Peters stated that ther are 3 crucial factors that need to be considered. These are being able to measure the product or service, accountability of it, and there needs to be innovation.
In terms of advertising, it is still very much alive and the typical 30 second advert is still very successful; but it is all about whether it is actually being seen. In the 1970's, only 3 adverts were needed to be broadcasted to get the message out. Today however, 117 adverts are needed to have the same impact. Advertising therefore is starting to get very costly as with more and more people swapping to digital television (87% of people with TVs now have digital), it is easy to simply cut out the ads. This may be a reason why swapping to digital methods of communication currently have the most power in the industry. This issue is backed up by the fact that recently it was announced that Google is bigger than ITV in advertising revenues.
Steve Cox's input was that the fastest growing media is currently the use of posters. With more and more people out and about, posters are an ideal way to get messages out.
One of the last pieces of advice given was that " you are only as good as your last piece of work". If your last bit of work for a client was rubbish, they will not return to you.
One of the most common words used in this session was ENTHUSIASM ENTHUSIASM ENTHUSIASM! Without enthusiasm, you will not be successful in what you do.
The next session was hosted by Tom Vick form worldwide advertising agency JWT. Again the message that came across was that currently online and digital marketing are killing TV advertising, however, this will gradually change.
Another piece of advice given was that "word of mouth is the new marketing sensation".
Most of this session was focused on future predictions, some of them were:
There will be a return to the full service agency. This will save on outsourcing and expenditure as every process to do with a campagin would be able to be completed by the one company.
The disciplines of account and channel planning will merge.
There will be an increase in global outsourcing and the "always on" agency. The idea of this is to pass work over to different time zones so that it is continually worked on 24 hours a day.
There will no longer be a purely digital agency or advertising agency.
There will be an emergence of mobile becoing a significant marketing channel. This can already be seen as mobile phones are adapting and are equippped with numerous applications, the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry can be examples of this.
Finally, there will be a greater focus on cost efficiency.
The part of enterprise week was women in business day. This was a day presented by inspirational and high achieving business women talking about how to become a success and the stages that need to be worked through. There was a presentation on personal image, ways to improve your public speaking, a talk from Bucks entrepeneur of the year from an agency called Cirkle about how she created her now very successful business, and finally, a session on exploring personality types and ways of thinking.
The final event that I attended was the Xing challenge. I didn't really know what to expect when I first arrived to this session, but soon found out that it was a dragons den type scenario where each team was given a business idea and we had to come up with a vision, a target and a business plan for the next 3 years. It was an extremely interesting day, lots of fun, but most importantly I learnt a lot from the panel of experts that we had to present our proposition to.
In this lecture, we looked primarily at why certain advertisments are memorable for certain types of people and why.
The task was to look at a number of different advertisments and try to remember as many as possible, stating our first recalled advert first.
One of the main differences found between who remembered what, was gender differences. It seemed that males repeatedly recalled the adverts that provided humour, and it seemed that most of the adverts with the funny twist were aimed at males promoting products and services for men. The females however tended to remember the adverts with celebrity endorsements, adverts for products such as perfumes. The advert for this Paco Rabanne fragrance, does not convey an extremely famous celebrity in their advert, (such as Beyonce beinf the face of Tommy Hilfiger's True Star) but it does draw your attention to the advert through other means.
Adverts that successfully use colour in their adverts can really catch your eye if contrasting is used effectively. The advert shown here has immediatly made the perfume stand out in the foreground by using the neon streaks of purple to intensify the name of the product. Because the rest of the advert is black and grey, this purple streak really amplifys the product being presented.
The senses are also used widely in advertising. Visual and touch are the two senses that most stand out in the paco rabanne advert, and this applies to many other adverts. It is strange however to notice that the sense of smell isn't addressed in perfume adverts, a sense that is vital to the success of perfumes and aftershaves.
A link was also found between the amount of analysis an advert required to understand the product being promoted. It seemed the more complicated the advert's underlying message, the less less likely the males remembered them.
There is also a theory on the primary and recency effect. This theory suggests that women would tend to remember the first advert they see whereas the men are more likely to remember the last advert they see. This theory is applicable to many other visual tests as well as the intake of words or knowledge etc.
"A persons unique make up which consistently influences the way the person responds to his or her environment."
"Those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect how a person responds to his or her environment." Schiffman and Kanuk (2004)
...has an external aspect (how someone interacts with someone else), an internal aspect (a combination of the person's values and attitudes), a dynamic aspect (how someone behaves when facing a new situation; social adjustments etc) and a consistent aspect (the person's characteristic style). Hollander
...is made up of an Id, an Ego and a Superego. The Id is the selfish part of the person, it is the part of you that wants to maximise your pleasure. The Superego is the part of you that is conscious of the society and it's rules. and the Ego is the part that mediates between the Id and the Superego, it is the part that creates a balance between the two opposites. Freud.
...develops from the level of anxiety felt at being a depedent child. Horney came up with 3 personality types dependent on the level of anxiety, these are; Compliant, Aggressive and Detached.
This image comes from Aaker's brand personality framework, his belief is that by choosing the category that most suits you, you can determine your main personality traits.
"The beliefs a person holds about his or her own attributes and how he or she evaluates those qualities." Solomon (1999)
"People see themselves as they imagine others see them." Solomon (1999) This quote suggests the importance of people's personal belongings. The quote suggests that people can assess others through merely looking at their possessions. Therefore, when it comes to people buying a certain product, they may not only be thinking about whether they like it or not, they may also be thinking about what others may think of that product and what assumptions people may make about you from buying such a product.
"The individual as perceived by that individual in a socially determined frame of reference." Newcomb
...does not necessarily reflect reality. It may not matter what the actual facts about that person are, it is what the person believes that makes self concept. This can account for people that suffer with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia; the person may be morbidly skinny, but they see themselves as overweight.
The advert shown below is all about self concept.
...is derived from social comparisons with others. James (1980) This is why there has been such controversy in regards to the amount of extremely skinny models being advertised in magazines promoting beauty, leading to a rise in young women and more recently young men suffering from eating disorders. If you have nothing else to compare yourself to but an unrealistically beautiful model with no faults whatsoever, then your self concept and self esteem will be dramatically affected. This could be either in a positive or negative way, and this is why advertising is so important, not only for promoting a product, but also for shaping how its audience react.
The larger the gap between the ideal self and self image, the lower the self esteem. The further away you want to be from what you actually are, the unhappier you are likely to be, hence your self esteem being dramatically lower. Dove have created a campaign for real beauty. This is to try and boost women's self esteem that are dampened by the unrealistic airbrushed and digitally edited faces and bodies in the media used to advertise beauty.
The majority of participants compared themselves with models in advertisements; comparisons were both general and specific. Most participants mentioned that their first reaction, when looking at advertising images, was to study the size of the model's body. Different models were envied for a variety of reasons such as their weight or height, their beauty or their age. Some younger respondents (aged 25-29) envied the models for their very thin figures:
'You look at the models and think...yeah, I'd like to be that thin...you think yes, I'm going to start that diet next week. It's like...you'd like to look like that.
By looking at this article, you can see just how much of an impact advertising can have on their target audience.
to look at what type of attitudes I tend to base the way I work on. After completing several questons, I found that I am a striver (trendy and fun loving, motivated by achievement, and always concerned about the opinion and approval of others!). In terms of purchasing, being a striver means that I am an active onsumer. This is because I see shopping as both a social occassion as well as an opportunity to demonstrate to my peers the ability to buy ( is this me?!) I also am as impulsive as my financial circumstance will allow ( No way!!). My "Striver" approach to life is supported by being an achiever.
