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CHAPTER 5 Motivation and Emotion: Driving Consumer Behavior What Do You Think Polling Question I do not allow emotions to control my behavior. _____ Strongly Disagree _____ Disagree _____ Somewhat Disagree _____ Neither Agree nor Disagree _____ Somewhat Agree _____ Agree _____ Strongly Agree Have students access Course Mate at www.cengagebrain.com to answer the polling questions for each chapter of CB. Ask them to take the online poll to see how their answers compare with other students taking a consumer behavior course across the country. Then turn to the last page of the chapter to find the What Others Have Thought box feature. This graph is a snapshot of how other consumer behavior students have answered this polling question so far. Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, the student should be able to: 5-1 Understand what initiates human behavior. 5-2 Classify basic consumer motivations. 5-3 Describe consumer emotions and demonstrate how they help shape value. 5-4 Apply different approaches to measuring consumer emotions. 5-5 Understand how different consumers express emotions in different ways. 5-6 Define and apply the concepts of schema-based affect and emotional contagion. Lecture Example Pairing products with rich emotional experiences is one of the most effective ways of building brand loyalty. The Disney experience is a case in point, where the Walt Disney Company has been successful in creating an iconic brand by designing great experiences for consumers. Every visit to the Disney theme parks is a memorable experience. Disney achieved unparalleled brand loyalty by engineering this emotion of happiness and wonder that consumers effortlessly associate with the brand. Source: “Testing the User Experience: Consumer Emotions and Brand Success,” UX Matters, October 19, 2009, http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/10/testing-the-user-experience-consumer-emotions-and-brand-success.php Lecture Outline with PowerPoint® Slides LO 5-1: Understand what initiates human behavior. Marketing researchers are picking up on ways they can try to judge consumer feelings based on posts to Twitter or other social networking sites. Sentiment analysis has met big data. The researchers use programs that try to match sentences or phrases to consumer feelings and then apply data mining procedures to search social networks for the sentences. [Instructor PPT Slide 4] I. What Drives Human Behavior? Simply put, motivations are the inner reasons or driving forces behind human actions that drive consumers to address real needs. However, motivations do much to provide the intended reason for a consumer’s actions. A. Homeostasis Human motivations are oriented around two key groups of behavior. The first is behavior aimed at maintaining one in a current acceptable state. Homeostasis refers to the fact that the body naturally reacts in a way to maintain a constant, normal bloodstream. Thus, consumers act to maintain things the way they are, and their wants are a function of the need driven by homeostasis. B. Self-Improvement The second group of behavior results from self-improvement motivation. These behaviors are aimed at changing one’s current state to a level that is more ideal—not simply maintaining the current state of existence. Self-improvement leads consumers to perform acts that cause emotions that help create hedonic value. C. Regulatory focus Regulatory focus theory, following closely from the contrast between homeostasis and self-improvement, puts forward the notion that consumers orient their behavior either through a prevention focus or a promotion focus. A prevention focus orients consumers toward avoiding negative consequences, while a promotion focus orients consumers toward the opportunistic pursuit of aspirations or ideals. The prevention terminology captures the motivation to maintain homeostasis, and the promotion focus shares similarity with self-improvement goals. Q: Give some examples of situations in which people orient their behavior with a prevention focus, and some in which they orient their behavior with a promotion focus. A: Students’ answers will vary. For example, a situation in which a prevention focus is operating is when people diet or restrict certain foods in order to prevent illness. A person operating with a promotion focus might begin cardio exercises in order to build stamina. LO 5-2: Classify basic consumer motivations. [Instructor PPT Slide 5] II. General Hierarchy of Motivation Perhaps the most popular theory of human motivation in consumer and organizational behavior is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This theory describes consumers as addressing a finite set of prioritized needs. The following list displays the set of needs, starting with the most basic. Physiological—basic survival Safety and security—the need to be secure and protected Belongingness and love—the need to feel like a member of a family or community Esteem—the need to be recognized as a person of worth Self-actualization—the need for personal fulfillment According to Maslow’s theory, people first seek value by satisfying the most basic needs. Thus, a starving consumer will risk safety to get something to eat. In contrast, when successful businesspeople retire, they may indeed find the most value in things that do not bring esteem, love, or safety, but instead provide self-fulfillment. Furthermore, Maslow’s hierarchy may operate differently around the world. Generally, the most basic needs are addressed with utilitarian value, and as needs become more elaborate, hedonic value is often needed to satiate the need state. Q: Discuss some products in which both hedonic and utilitarian motivations operate simultaneously. A: Students’ answers will vary. For example, when buying a jacket, a consumer would be concerned about warmth and durability, but also about the way the jacket looks when it’s worn. Automobile purchases are motivated both by the look of the car and the feel of driving it as by the technical aspects such as mileage. [Instructor PPT Slide 6] A. Simpler Classification of Consumer Motivations A simple but very useful way to understand consumer behavior (CB) is to classify motives based on whether a consumption act can best address a particular need by realizing utilitarian or hedonic value. Utilitarian Motivation Utilitarian motivation is a drive to acquire products that consumers can use to accomplish things. Utilitarian motivation bears much in common with the idea of maintaining behavior. In the sense the utilitarian motivation helps a consumer maintain his or her state, these motivations work much like homeostasis. Hedonic Motivation Hedonic motivation involves a drive to experience something personally gratifying. These behaviors are usually emotionally satisfying. Exhibit 5.2 illustrates some typical behaviors that are motivated by utilitarian or hedonic shopping motives. B. Consumer Involvement Involvement is synonymous with motivation. A highly involved consumer is strongly motivated to expend resources in a particular consumption activity. Consumer involvement represents the degree of personal relevance a consumer finds in pursuing value from a given category of consumption. Thus, when a consumer is highly involved, there is a greater chance of achieving relatively high value, as long as things go as expected. Consumer Involvement as a Moderator A moderating variable is one that changes the nature of a relationship between two other variables. Exhibit 5.3 illustrates the way a moderating variable works. Highly involved consumers are likely to take more time because they recognize a greater number of attractive alternatives. Different Types of Involvement Involvement can mean different things to different people. Here are some key types of consumer involvement: Product involvement means that some product category has personal relevance. Product enthusiasts are consumers with very high involvement in some category. Shopping involvement represents the personal relevance of shopping activities. This relevance enhances personal shopping value. From a utilitarian value perspective, highly involved shoppers are more likely to process information about deals and react to price reductions and limited offers that create better deals. Situational involvement represents the temporary involvement associated with some imminent purchase situation. Situational involvement often comes about when consumers are shopping for something that they have little interest in but comes with a relatively high price. Enduring involvement is not temporary but rather represents a continuing interest in some product or opportunity. Enduring involvement is associated with hedonic value, because learning about, shopping for, or consuming a product for which a consumer has high enduring involvement is personally gratifying. Emotional involvement represents how emotional a consumer gets during some specific consumption activity. Emotional involvement shares much in common with enduring involvement because the things that consumers care most about will eventually create highly emotional responses. LO 5-3: Describe consumer emotions and demonstrate how they help shape value. [Instructor PPT Slide 7] III. Consumer Emotions and Value A. Emotion Emotions are specific psychobiological reactions to appraisals. Emotions are psychobiological because they involve both psychological processing and physical responses. Indeed, emotions create visceral responses, meaning that certain feeling states coincide with certain behaviors in a very direct way. Emotions are extremely important to CB and marketing because consumers react most immediately to their feelings. Behaviors are closely tied to emotion, creating close links between emotions, CB, and value. Thus, marketing success is determined by emotions, because actions bring value to a consumer to the extent that desirable emotional states can be created. Q: Discuss examples of product types that use anticipation appraisals to influence consumers to make a purchase decision. A: Students’ answers will vary. Products such as insurance frequently use anticipation appraisals evoking feelings of anxiety about the future. Beauty products, on the other hand, use anticipation appraisals to evoke hope for improvement in the future. B. Cognitive Appraisal Theory Psychologists have debated the different sources of emotions for decades, but cognitive appraisal theory represents an increasingly popular school of thought. Cognitive appraisal theory describes how specific types of thoughts can serve as a basis for specific emotions. Four types of cognitive appraisals are especially relevant for consumer behavior. Anticipation appraisals—focuses on the future and can elicit anticipatory emotions like hopefulness or anxiety. Agency appraisals—reviews responsibility for events and can evoke consequential emotions like gratefulness, frustration, guilt, or sadness. Equity appraisals—considers how fair some event is and can evoke emotions like warmth or anger. Outcomes appraisals—consider how something turned out relative to one’s goals and can evoke emotions like joyfulness, satisfaction, sadness, or pride. Exhibit 5.4 illustrates each of these appraisal types. C. Emotion Terminology Mood Consumer mood represents a transient (temporary and changing) and general feeling state often characterized with simple descriptors such as a “good mood,” “bad mood,” or even a “funky mood.” Moods are generally considered less intense than many other emotional experiences; nevertheless, moods can influence CB. Employees’ moods can also affect consumption outcomes as they interact with consumer mood. A consumer’s mood can serve as a type of frame that can transfer into product value judgments. In doing so, consumers make mood congruent judgments, an evaluation in which they judge the value of a target in a mood-consistent way. Sometimes, a consumer intentionally goes about some action as a way of altering mood. In much the same way, research shows that consumers who are in bad moods may be more likely to be generous to others. Affect Affect is another term used to represent the feelings a consumer experiences during the consumption process. However, in CB, consumer affect is more often used to represent the feelings a consumer has about a particular product or activity. Exhibit 5.5 represents the relationship between emotion, consumer mood and consumer affect. Q: How do retail stores influence consumers’ moods in order to encourage mood-congruent buying decisions? A: Students’ answers will vary. Students can describe layout, design, service, or ambience cues that stores use in order to influence consumers’ moods and encourage them to buy. LO 5-4: Apply different approaches to measuring consumer emotions. [Instructor PPT Slide 8] IV. Measuring Emotion Marketing and consumer researchers place a great deal of emphasis on properly measuring consumer emotion, because emotions play such a key role in shaping value. However, there is no consensus on the best way to measure consumer emotions. Two issues that regularly arise are whether consumers have introspection (can express verbally) connected to their emotions, and how to best categorize these emotions if they can be communicated. A. Autonomic Measures Autonomic measures are means for automatically recording visceral reactions or neurological brain activity. Autonomic emotion measures monitor things like facial reactions, physiological responses such as sweating in a galvanic skin response or lie detector test, heart rate, and electrical activity in areas of the brain responsible for certain specific emotions, which can be documented via brain imaging. Autonomic measures assess emotional activity without requiring a volitional response from the consumer. This advantage comes with the drawback of greater intrusiveness. Autonomic measures usually require the attachment of some type of device to the consumer. Consumers do not typically view ads strapped into a machine or with electrodes attached to their skin. Interestingly, however, research suggests that these autonomic responses generally correspond fairly well to introspective self-reports of emotional experience, suggesting to some extent that consumers do know how they feel. [Instructor PPT Slide 9] B. Self-report Measures Self-report affect measures require consumers to recall their affect state from a recent experience, or to state the affect they are feeling at a given point in time. These survey approaches usually involve a questionnaire; the process is not perfect, but generally results are valid enough to be useful to consumer and marketing researchers. Exhibit 5.6 illustrates a web-based survey approach for assessing emotion using slider scales. PAD PAD is an acronym that stands for pleasure–arousal–dominance, three dimensions proposed to represent emotional experiences. A PAD scaling approach asks consumers to rate their feelings using a number of semantic differential (bipolar opposites) items that capture emotions experienced in an environment. The theory behind PAD is that pleasure— the evaluative dimension of emotion—is bipolar, meaning that if one feels joyful, one cannot also experience sadness. Arousal also is bipolar, in that a consumer is either aroused or bored, as is dominance, the degree that one feels in control of the environment. Many researchers use a PAD approach to study shopping environment atmospherics. Because the scale captures arousal separately, the approach is advantageous when the degree of activation or excitement is of particular interest. The PAD approach allows a separate accounting for feelings of dominance, sometimes known as control. PANAS PANAS stands for the positive–affect–negative–affect scale and allows respondents to self-report the extent to which they feel one of 20 emotional adjectives. Researchers generally apply the PANAS to capture the relative amount of positive and negative emotion experienced by a consumer at a given point in time. Every PANAS item represents either a good or a bad feeling. Thus, one might wonder why “inspired” and “upset” would both need to be measured. The best one can say in addressing whether feeling bad is more influential than feeling good is “sometimes.” Thus, when consumer researchers are studying highly complex situations, a scale like PANAS allows them to capture both positive and negative dimensions of emotional experience. Q: Students could be asked to rate their feelings on a PANAS scale following a dining experience at a high-end restaurant and at a fast-food outlet. Compare the scores and discuss the implications of these. A: Students’ answers will vary. Students should be encouraged to analyze the reasons for the scores they have given the restaurants. LO 5-5: Understand how different consumers express emotions in different ways. [Instructor PPT Slide 10] V. Differences in Emotional Behavior Emotions are tied deeply to individual differences such as motivations and traits. Thus, personality characteristics can affect the way consumers experience or demonstrate their emotions. Marketers benefit from consumer research describing how individual differences relate to emotional experience. A. Emotional Involvement Emotional involvement is the type of deep personal interest that evokes strongly felt feelings associated with some object or activity. Emotional involvement drives one to consume generally through repeated experiences of relatively strong hedonic motivations. Often, emotional involvement can make a consumer appear irrational. Emotional involvement increases when the consumer receives something extra with products that are purchased. Flow All consumers can probably relate to the experience of enjoying a good book or movie so much that one loses awareness of time passing. When this occurs, a consumer has achieved a state of flow, meaning extremely high emotional involvement in which a consumer is engrossed in an activity. Computer-related activities are common contributors to flow. In the extreme, consumers can become addicted to surfing the Internet, social networking, or online gaming. Addictions like this are driven in part by a desire to achieve the state of flow where one escapes the real world and realizes high hedonic value. Online consumers can pursue a flow state while shopping; however, interruptions in Internet service, poor navigational clues, or slow page load times can all inhibit the flow experience and lower both utilitarian and hedonic shopping value. [Instructor PPT Slides 11, 12] B. Emotional Expressiveness Emotional expressiveness represents the extent to which a consumer shows outward behavioral signs and otherwise reacts obviously manner to emotional experiences. The consumer with relatively high emotional expressiveness is more likely to react in some way to outcomes that are not expected. C. Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence is a term used to captures one’s awareness of the emotions experienced in a situation, and an ability to control reactions to those emotions. This includes awareness of the emotions experienced by the individual as well as awareness and sympathy for the emotions experienced by others. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a multifaceted concept; Exhibit 5.7 illustrates EI components. High EI consumers are able to use awareness of emotions in decision making and are better able to manage their own emotions and exhibit self-control. In a marketing context, salespeople and service providers with high emotional intelligence often are considered more effective. EI training is becoming commonplace as marketers attempt to create more value for customers they serve. D. What’s Funny Marketer’s often try to evoke laughter as a way of getting attention or creating positive affect that may become associated with a brand. Funny things usually present some mental incongruity that a consumer’s brain naturally tries to resolve. The contrasting concepts challenge the consumer’s brain to try to resolve inconsistencies. Humor creates value-added experiences through hedonic value and can serve more utilitarian functions such as reducing stress. Q: Discuss some current advertisements that use humor to attract attention to the products. What are the disadvantages of using humor in advertising? A: Students’ answers will vary. The humor in the ad may take center stage, and the product itself may not be remembered. Humorous ads for unusual or unfamiliar ads may attract attention, but may not convey enough product information to interest consumers. LO 5-6: Define and apply the concepts of schema-based affect and emotional contagion. VI. Emotion, Meaning, and Schema-Based Affect Intuitively, emotion and cognition seem so different that one might easily presume the two are completely independent. However, emotion and cognition are actually closely related. One can easily see the close relationship in the role that affect, mood, and emotion play in signaling and developing meaning. [Instructor PPT Slide 13] A. Semantic Wiring A consumer’s ability to remember things about brands and products can be explained using theory developed around the principles of semantic or associative networks. Although the term semantic refers to cognitive thought processes, the active processing and storage of knowledge depends on emotions in several ways. The general expression “emotional effect on memory” refers to relatively superior recall for information presented with mild affective content compared to similar information presented in an affectively neutral way. The implications for marketing are fairly direct. Marketing communications that present product information in a way that evokes mild levels of emotions will tend to be more effective in producing recall than communications that are affectively neutral. Exhibit 5.8 illustrates the way emotions shape the meaning of a brand. [Instructor PPT Slide 14] B. Mood-Congruent Recall Autobiographical memories are memories of the previous meaningful events in one’s life. Consumers are more likely to recall autobiographical memories characterized by specific moods when the same mood occurs again in the future. Mood-congruent recall means that to the extent that a consumer’s mood can be controlled, his or her memories and evaluations can be influenced. Music is one tool useful in inducing moods. When music sets a mood, consumers will recall products associated with that mood more readily. Q: Ask students for examples of brands that use nostalgia as part of their advertising messages or brand appeal. What kinds of products usually use this appeal? A: Students’ answers will vary. For example, Coca Cola frequently uses ads based on nostalgia to evoke its classic appeal. Nostalgia can motivate consumers to purchase products. Consumers attempt to relive the pleasant feelings of the past through the purchase of these products or services. C. Schema-Based Affect Knowledge of familiar things becomes organized in a cognitive unit of meaning known as a schema. A schema contains the knowledge of a brand, a product, or any concept. Schemata are developed and reinforced through actual experience. Experience involves more than cognition. Emotions become part of the meaning for a category in the form of schema-based affect. Exhibit 5.9 displays examples of schema-based affect that can influence consumers’ reactions to consumption experiences. Aesthetic Labor Aesthetic labor deals specifically with employees who most carefully manage their own personal appearance as a requisite to performing their job well, and fitting what managers see as the stereotype for their particular company’s service. Many service employees—including cosmetic representatives and fashion models for companies like L’Oréal and Victoria’s Secret, flight attendants, and table servers or such companies as Korean Air and Hooters—perform aesthetic labor. The belief is that a specific appearance generates the appropriate emotional reaction in the consumer. From a marketing standpoint, aesthetic labor helps set the mood for an effective service environment. Thus, by creating a known and identifiable look, the company can affect the feelings of its customers, which in turn, drives value. In this sense, aesthetic labor is a form of emotional labor, meaning that part of the job of many service providers is to manage the emotions of the customers. [Instructor PPT Slide 15] D. Self-Conscious Emotions Self-conscious emotions result from some evaluation or reflection of one’s own behavior—which can include both actions and failures to act. Self-conscious emotions include pride, embarrassment, guilt, regret, shame, and hope. Consumers experiencing negative self-conscious emotions can perceive not only the need to rectify the problem, but also the need to restore their self-esteem. Consumers may feel guilty for the way they treat a service provider. Consumers sometimes feel self-conscious when they see consumers who are not as wealthy and lack buying power. In such an instance, a consumer may perform some counterbalancing behavior such as making a charitable contribution. E. Emotional Contagion Emotional contagion represents the extent to which an emotional display by one person influences the emotional state of a bystander. Consumers who perceive other consumers or employees around them as either happy or sad may experience a corresponding change in actual happiness or sadness themselves. When service providers maintain an expression signaling positive affect (service with a smile), consumers report higher incidences of positive affect themselves. Product Contamination Product contamination refers to the fact that consumers feel uneasy about buying things that others have previously touched. Supermarket consumers can be seen searching the back of a shelf for an untouched package or avoiding produce that they have seen others handling. Video material for this chapter can be found on page 22 of the IM Instructor Manual for CB Consumer Behaviour Barry J. Babin, Eric G. Harris 9781305403222, 9781305577244
