Involvement&Motivation

Involvement Theory that Creates Consumer Motivation in Buying Decision

Assignment Objective

Discuss involvement theory and its implication for marketers. For a product of your choice, indicate your marketing strategy to market it to a low involvement consumer and a high involvement consumer.

I. Introduction

Humans as social beings are never satisfied. According to Abraham Maslow in his theory of hierarchy needs, humans are always trying to increase their level of satisfaction (1987). To fulfill their needs, humans are using the brain to think and then conduct their decisions and actions. These processes are interesting, because there are a lot of factors involved in the process of human decision-making. Here is the role of marketers to fulfill and also create the humans' needs.

Advertising is one of the ways to fulfill and create the humans' needs. In today's marketing trends, marketers are trying to develop an advertisement that psychologically hit the humans' brain sweet spot. This paper will discuss the relations of human's brain, involvement, and motivation in buying decisions.

II. Human Brain and Its Function

It is widely known that human's brain consist of two parts, which are left hemisphere and right hemisphere. Each of these hemispheres has a special function that processes information received by humans (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 240). However, both of these hemispheres are related one to each other by a nerve system called corpus callosum (Flemming, 1981, p. 24). A study by Flemming Hansen (1981) shows that if corpus callosum does not work as it should, human's brain will be not perfectly able to process information received by the eyes. Hansen's examination on normal human's brain found that corpus callosum has an important role in combining information between both brain's hemispheres. Furthermore, Hansen found that right brain hemisphere dealt with audiovisual and artistic impression, then the left brain hemisphere dealt with controls and symbolic information (27).

Picture taken from Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 8, June 1981

As seen from the Figure II.1, the corpus callosum has an important factor that makes both sides of the brain can work together to process the information. However, in certain cases of brain dysfunction such as epileptic, cutting the corpus callosum may help patient to recover from the epileptic problem. The research of curing epileptic and cutting the corpus callosum brings the findings on left and right brain function in understanding information that is received by the patient's eyes.

Picture taken from Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 8, June 1981

The study about corpus callosum (Figure II.2) conducted by Spery (1973) then cited by Hansen (1981, p. 25) found that the scissors located to the right visual field of the patient (with left visual field masked), will resulted the patient understanding that there is a scissors. Then, if the scissors is presented on the left visual field of the patient (with right visual field masked), it will result in the patient not recognizing the scissors verbally. However, the patient will still recognize that there is a scissors because the respondent can pick up the scissors when told to do so. But, the patient cannot recognize the verbal form of scissors.

The findings on function of each brain hemispheres help marketing researchers to do further research about consumer response in various types of marketing activity. To understand the relation between marketing and brain functioning, in 1987 Banwari Mittal conduct a research about consumer involvement and hemispherical lateralization. Mittal was using EEG (electroencephalography) as a way to measure respondent's brain activity. Mittal founds that the respondent's brain will response differently based on types of advertising that being tested at that time. These findings on brain mapping and its functions leads to the research about human mind involvement and buying decision.

III. Involvement Theory

There are a lot of models that developed by marketing researcher to perfectly measure consumers' needs and wants. Before the involvement theory was found, marketing researchers assumed that consumer use a continuous step before finally coming to purchase decisions. The continuous steps include a complex series of mental and behavior that ranged from awareness to evaluation, to behavior, then to final evaluation.

Findings in distinct brain function lead the marketing researchers to realize that there are other factors involved in buying decisions without involving a series complex process of thought seen on Figure III.1; then, the buying decision just related to personal relevancy (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 240). Further research about human buying decisions based on involvement theory discovered that the left side of brain has nature of "rational, active and realistic," then the right side of brain has nature of "emotional, metaphoric, impulsive, and intuitive" (Schifman and Kanuk, 2007, 240).

Based on these brain natures, early involvement theory created by the marketing researchers divides consumer involvement into two levels that are low involvement and high involvement. According to Mittal (1987, p. 41), Krugman in 1970 was the first marketing researcher that suggested high involvement consumer behavior is related to the left brain proficiency and low involvement of consumer behavior is related to the right brain proficiency.

To determine the level of consumer involvement, marketing researchers use the importance of items related with personal feelings of the consumer. Therefore, high involvement activities that so-called cognitive processes will relate to the items that are very important to the consumer, and need to be carefully assessed before ending in a buying decision; then, low involvement consumer activities will relate to any buying activities that do not have any further consideration because it only has very little relevancy to the consumer (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 242). For these reasons, every consumer will have his or her own preferences for determining factors involved in their feelings on buying decisions and then marketing researchers can determine consumers' high or low involvement preferences based on their condition. As shown in Figure III.2, Schifman and Kanuk (2007, p.244)