Involvement

The terms motivation and involvement have been used interchangeably in the literature, because of this the implications of both motivation and involvement on consumer response to advertisements are discussed in this section. MacInnis and Jaworski (1989) argue that

‘motivation’ is a broader construct, which refers to consumer’s desire or intent to process brand information in an advertisements, though the term involvement has also been used with the same meaning (MacInnis and Jaworski 1989). Involvement is a key element in consumer evaluation of marketing offerings and refers to the extent to which consumers perceive a product to be relevant and personally important to them (Engel et al. 1995). In line with this definition, Laroche, Bergeron and Goutaland (2003:126) argue that ‘involvement can be synonymous with ‘importance, interest, attachment and/or motivation manifested towards an object’. High involvement purchase situations lead to a greater information search and more elaborate brand evaluations. High involvement situations are characterized by high expenditure and risk, low involvement situations tend to be simple evaluations about purchases. Involvement is affected by self-image, perceived risk, social factors and hedonism (Laurent and Kapferer 1985), and moderated by a consumer’s identified need and ability to process the information (MacInnis and Jaworski 1989). Early research relating to consumer involvement and rhetorical structures reveals contradictory findings; high involvement consumers are shown to be unaffected by the openness of the advertisement (Kardes 1988), another study illustrates that high involvement consumers have more positive brand attitudes when presented with open-ended ad claims (Sawyer 1988). More recent research finds the use of tropes enhances the depth of cognitive processing and positively impacts ad and

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product attitudes, but only for low involvement subjects (Toncar and Munch 2001). This is explained by the properties of rhetorical structures which motivate low involvement consumers to elaborate on the advertisement, whereas high involvement consumers are argued to be motivated to process the information regardless of how it is presented. In conditions of low involvement the ad may be perceived as more clever, entertaining and pleasurable, whereas high involvement consumers may experience heightened skepticism as they question why an indirect tactic is used to persuade them. In contrast, Peracchio and Meyers-Levy’s (1997) research on resource matching and persuasion techniques argues that motivation must be high for the ad executional strategy to have a differential effect on consumer responses. They show that low motivated individual’s evaluate ads heuristically and are therefore unaffected by the framing strategy, whereas high motivated individuals are impacted by the ad executional strategies. This is in line with Mattila (2000), whose research suggests that high consumer involvement is a prerequisite for the processing of narratives to occur and meaning to be inferred. This suggests that narrative framing is most effective in situations of high involvement and future research on consumer response to framing strategies needs to take involvement into account.

2.4.4.1. Involvement & Cognitive Capacity

The cognitive goal of high motivated individuals is an arduous one. They typically consider all of the information in the stimulus carefully, scrutinizing the ad claims (Petty et al. 1983).

High motivated consumers tend to seek balanced attitudes based on the valid merits of a product that they can verify for truth with reasonable certainty (Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly 1989; Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983). A variety of tasks are involved in achieving this goal, including: determining the key service claims while processing the ad copy and cross-referencing these claims with relevant aspects of the ad image to assert the validity of each claim with reasonable certitude. For example, to assess verbal ad copy claiming the superior quality of a beer, a motivated individual may scrutinize the image of the beer for quality related information, such as the richness of the beer’s color and how the label conveys quality (Peracchio & Meyers-Levy 1994). Finally, the overall authenticity and plausibility of the service claims are determined, including the level of consistency and salience of exaggeration, so that a valid attitude to the service can be established. The extent and complexity of these cognitive activities indicate high motivated individuals have

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substantial demands on their resources when engaged in ad processing (Peracchio and Meyers-Levy 1997).

Individuals lacking the motivation to effortfully process the ad claims are likely to engage in heuristic based processing, and attempt to form an overall impression of the service quickly, in doing so maintaining cognitive resources (Shanteau 1988). For example, less motivated consumers may select a salient or easily accessible heuristic cue, like the attractiveness of the ad image that facilitates quick and shallow attitude formation (Chaiken et al. 1989, Petty et al.

1983). As such, cognitive resources required to achieve such goals are low, in line with the meager resource made available by less motivated individuals for ad processing. As has been empirically illustrated, such individuals are insensitive to and unaffected by such ad executional characteristics as the framing strategy, e.g. argument versus narrative (Peracchio

& Meyers-Levy 1997), or the ambiguity of the advertisement (Peracchio & Meyers-Levy 1994). This is because in low involvement situations, individuals are argued to engage in heuristic based processing regardless of the cognitive resources demanded by different ad elements, e.g. the framing of the ad copy. Given that less motivated ad recipients don’t typically engage in substantiation of service claims, they are also less affected by variation in ad layout. The literature clearly asserts that involvement levels moderate the impact of framing strategies on consumer response, indicating this variable needs to be measured and either controlled or included as a moderating variable in future empirical research in this area.

Table 2.5 Moderating Individual Difference Variables

Emotional Competency Processing Style Involvement Affect Intensity Knowledge Tolerance of

Ambiguity

Empathy Cognitive

Capacity

Need for Cognition Metaphor

Thinking Ability

Visualizer/

Verbalizer

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