Marketing Chapter 5 Motivation And Emotion Driving Consumer Behavior Learning Objectives After Studying This

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Chapter 5

Motivation and Emotion: Driving Consumer

Behavior

Learning Objectives

After studying this chapter, students should be able to accomplish the following objectives.

5-1 Understand what initiates human behavior.

5-3 Describe consumer emotions and demonstrate how they help shape value.

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

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.

I. What Drives Human Behavior? [Instructor PPT Slide 3]

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

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

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.

LO 5-2: Classify basic consumer motivations.

II. General Hierarchy of Motivation [Instructor PPT Slides 4 and 5]

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 (food, drink, shelter, etc.)

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.

Q: Discuss some products in which both hedonic and utilitarian motivations operate

simultaneously.

A. Simpler Classification of Consumer Motivations [Instructor PPT Slide 6]

A simple but very useful way to understand consumer behavior (CB) is to classify motives

based on whether some need creates wants associated with predominantly 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 that utilitarian motivation helps a consumer maintain his or her state,

these motivations work much like homeostasis.

Hedonic Motivation

B. Consumer Involvement [Instructor PPT Slide 7]

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 [Instructor PPT Slide 8]

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,

LO 5-3: Describe consumer emotions and demonstrate how they help shape value.

III. Consumer Emotions and Value

A. Emotion [Instructor PPT Slide 3]

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: Ask students to discuss examples of product types that use anticipation appraisals to

influence consumers to make a purchase decision.

B. Cognitive Appraisal Theory [Instructor PPT Slide 10]

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 appraisal—focuses on the future and can elicit anticipatory emotions like

hopefulness or anxiety

• Agency appraisal—reviews responsibility for events and can evoke consequential

emotions like gratefulness, frustration, guilt, or sadness

• Equity appraisal—considers how fair some event is and can evoke emotions like

warmth or anger

• Outcomes appraisal—considers 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 [Instructor PPT Slide 11]

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.

Affect

Affect is another term used to represent the feelings a consumer experiences during the

consumption process. However, in CB, consumer affect is often used to represent the

general feelings a consumer has about a particular product or activity expressed as tone or

liking. Exhibit 5.5 contrasts the notion of emotion, consumer mood, and consumer affect

and illustrates how they create value.

Q: How do retail stores influence consumers’ mood-congruent buying decisions?

LO 5-4: Apply different approaches to measuring consumer emotions.

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. The CB researcher

has multiple options and technologies for measuring emotions. Some tools measure physical

reactions of consumers, from which the researcher infers emotions. Other tools require the

respondent to self-assess his/her emotional state. Each approach has advantages and

disadvantages.

A. Autonomic Measures [Instructor PPT Slide 12 and 13]

Autonomic measures automatically record visceral body reactions or neurological (brain)

activity. Autonomic emotion measures monitor things like facial reactions, physiological

responses such as sweating in a galvanic skin response, heart rate, pupil dilation, and electrical

activity in areas of the brain responsible for certain specific emotions, which can be

documented via brain imaging.

Eye-tracking technologies are increasingly popular because they are relatively inexpensive

and not as intrusive as most neurological measurements. Eyetracking technology combines

hardware and software that can measure precisely where a consumer’s gaze is directed and

also assess pupil dilation.

B. Self-Report Measures [Instructor PPT Slide 14]

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

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 [Instructor PPT Slide 15]

The things that tap our deepest emotions have the ability to evoke the greatest value. This

brings us to emotional involvement, meaning 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 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.

B. Emotional Expressiveness [Instructor PPT Slide 16]

Emotional expressiveness represents the extent to which a consumer shows outward

behavioral signs and otherwise reacts obviously to emotional experiences. The consumer with

relatively high emotional expressiveness is more likely to react in some way to outcomes that

are unexpected.

C. Emotional Intelligence [Instructor PPT Slides 17 and 18]

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 these emotions. This includes

awareness of the emotions experienced by the individual as well as an awareness and

sympathy for the emotions experienced by others.

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: Ask students to discuss some current advertisements that use humor to attract

attention to the products. What are the disadvantages of using humor in advertising?

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 can play in signaling

and developing meaning.

A. Semantic Wiring [Instructor PPT Slide 19]

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.

B. Mood-Congruent Recall [Instructor PPT Slide 20]

Autobiographical memories are memories of 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.

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?

C. Schema-Based Affect [Instructor PPT Slide 21]

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

D. Self-Conscious Emotions [Instructor PPT Slide 22]

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 some problem, but also the need

E. Emotional Contagion [Instructor PPT Slide 22]

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

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 the 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

End of Chapter Material

Discussion Questions

(*) Indicates material on prep cards.

1. *Define the concept of consumer motivation. What two orientations are driven by

consumer motivations?

2. Relate regulatory focus theory to the two basic orientations of consumer behavior

described above.