Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and

Being
Thirteenth Edition, Global Edition

Chapter 5

Motivation and Affect

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Learning Objectives
5.1 Products can satisfy a range of consumer needs.
5.2 Consumers experience a range of affective responses to
products and marketing messages.
5.3 The way we evaluate and choose a product depends on
our degree of involvement with the product, the marketing
message, or the purchase situation.

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Learning Objective 5.1
• Products can satisfy a range of consumer needs.

To understand motivation is to understand why consumers do what they do.

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The Motivation Process: Why Ask
Why?
• Motivation refers to the processes that lead people to
behave as they do. It occurs when a need is aroused that
the consumer wishes to satisfy. The need creates a state
of tension that drives the consumer to attempt to reduce or
eliminate it.
• This need may be utilitarian (i.e., a desire to achieve
some functional or practical benefit) or it may be hedonic
(i.e., an experiential need, involving emotional responses
or fantasies).
• The desired end state is the consumer’s goal.

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 The Motivation Process: Why Ask Why?

• Incidental brand exposure: a

person do not even need to
be aware of a motivation to
achieve a goal.
• Some students scored
higher on difficult Graduate
Records Examination
questions when they took
the test using a
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology pen.

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Motivational Strength
• Drive Theory: Focuses on biological needs that produce
unpleasant states of arousal (e.g., your stomach grumbles
during a morning class).
– Homeostasis: The arousal this tension causes motivates
us to reduce it and return to a balanced state called
homeostasis.
– Retail Therapy: The act of shopping restores a sense of
personal control over one’s environment and as a result
can alleviate feelings of sadness.
• If a behavior reduces the drive, we naturally tend to repeat it.
• Your degree of motivation, then, depends on the distance
between your present state and the goal.
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Motivational Strength
• Expectancy Theory: Focuses on cognitive factors rather
than biological ones to understand what motivates behavior.
Expectancy theory suggests that expectations of achieving
desirable outcomes—positive incentives—rather than being
pushed from within motivate our behavior.
• The placebo effect vividly demonstrates the role that
expectations play on our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

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Motivational Direction
Needs Versus Wants: A want (like fast food) is a specific
way to satisfy a need (like hunger).

For some, jumping out of an airplane is a valuable hedonic experience.

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Motivational Conflicts
A person has an approach–approach conflict when he or she must
choose between two desirable alternatives.

Sometimes we’re also

motivated to avoid a negative
outcome rather than achieve a
positive outcome (negative
reinforcement). An approach–
avoidance conflict occurs when
we desire a goal but wish to
avoid it at the same time.

Marketers frequently address an avoidance–avoidance conflict with messages that

stress the unforeseen benefits of choosing one option (e.g., when they emphasize
special credit plans to ease the pain of car payments).

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The theory of cognitive dissonance
• It is based on the premise that people have a need for order and
consistency in their lives and that a state of dissonance (tension) exists
when beliefs or behaviors conflict with one another
• Postdecision dissonance occurs when a consumer must choose
between two products, both of which possess good and bad qualities.
When he or she chooses one product and not the other, the person
gets the bad qualities of the product he or she buys and loses out on
the good qualities of the one he or she didn’t buy. This loss creates an
unpleasant, dissonant state.
• We tend to convince ourselves, after the fact, that the choice we made
was the smart one as we find additional reasons to support the
alternative we did choose (rationalization).

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Classifying Consumer Needs
Numerous psychologists have tried to define a universal inventory of needs they
could trace systematically to explain virtually all behavior

Murray’s psychogenic needs

• Autonomy (being independent), defendence (defending the self
against criticism), play (engaging in pleasurable activities).

Specific needs
• Need for Achievement (strongly value personal accomplishment)
• Need for Affiliation (to be in the company of other people)
• Need for Power (to control one’s environment)
• Need for Uniqueness (to assert one’s individual identity)
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Figure 5.2 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
We must attain a certain level before we activate a need for the next, higher one.

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• How gardening could satisfy needs at every level of the
hierarchy?

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• Physiological—“I eat what I grow.”
• Safety—“I feel safe in the garden.”
• Social—“I can share my produce with others.”
• Esteem—“I can create something of beauty.”
• Self-actualization—“My garden gives me a sense of
peace.”

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• Give an example when you had a need for affiliation,
power, or uniqueness.

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Learning Objective 5.2
Consumers experience a range of affective responses to
products and marketing messages.

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Affect
• Many of our decisions are driven by our emotional
responses to products. Social scientists refer to these raw
reactions as affect.
• That explains why so many marketing activities and
messages focus on altering our moods or linking their
products to an affective response, although different types
of emotional arousal may be more effective in some
contexts than others.

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 Types of Affective Responses (1)
• Evaluations: Evaluations are valanced (i.e., positive or negative)
reactions to events and objects that are not accompanied by high
levels of physiological arousal. For example, when a consumers
evaluates a movie as being positive or negative, this usually
involves some degree of affect accompanied by low levels of
arousal.
• Moods: Moods involve temporary positive or negative affective
states accompanied by moderate levels of arousal. Moods tends
to be diffuse and not necessarily linked to a particular event (e.g.
you might have just “woken up on the wrong side of the bed this
morning”).
• Emotions: Emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear tend to
be more intense and often relate to a specific triggering event
such as receiving an awesome gift.
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Types of Affective Responses (2)
• Negative State relief: Helping others as a way to resolve one’s
own negative moods is known as negative state relief.
• Sadvertising: Recently we’ve seen a trend in advertising toward
inspirational stories that manipulate our emotions like a
rollercoaster. Think about the commercials Budweiser likes to run
about a puppy who befriends a horse, gets lost, finds his way
home, etc.
• Emotional Oracle effect: Interplay between our emotions and how
we access information in our minds that allows us to make
smarter decisions

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Mood Congruency
• Refers to the idea that our judgments tend to be shaped by
our moods.

• This is why advertisers attempt to place their ads after

humorous TV programming or create uplifting ad
messages that put viewers in a good mood.

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Positive Affect
• Lovemark: is a passionate commitment to one brand. The
prospect of owning a specific brand will make a person feel
good can give it a competitive advantage—even if the
brand is similar on a functional level to other competing
brands.
• Happiness: is a mental state of well-being characterized by
positive emotions. Several studies have reported that a
greater emphasis on acquiring things actually links to lower
levels of happiness!
• Material accumulation: which is what researchers term the
instinct to earn more than we can possibly consume, even
when this imbalance makes us unhappy.
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Negative Affect
Marketing messages can make us sad, angry, or even
depressed—and sometimes that’s done on purpose!
• Disgust
• Envy
• Guilt
• Embarrasment

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How Social Media Tap into Our Emotions
• Proponents of a happiness economy claim that wellbeing is
the new wealth, and social media technology is what allows us
to accumulate it.
• A technique called sentiment analysis refers to a process
(sometimes also called opinion mining) that scours the social
media universe to collect and analyze the words people use
when they describe a specific product or company. When
people feel a particular way, they are likely to choose certain
words that tend to relate to the emotion.
• From these words, the researcher creates a wordphrase
dictionary (sometimes called a library) to code the data. The
program scans the text to identify whether the words in the
dictionary appear.
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For Reflection (2 of 4)
• Give an example of when an advertisement had a negative
or positive affect on you.

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Learning Objective 5.3
The way we evaluate and choose a product depends on our
degree of involvement with the product, the marketing
message, or the purchase situation.

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Consumer Involvement
• Involvement is “a person’s perceived relevance of the object
based on their inherent needs, values, and interests.”
• Inertia describes consumption at the low end of involvement,
where we make decisions out of habit because we lack the
motivation to consider alternatives.
• Cult products such as Apple command fierce consumer
loyalty, devotion, and maybe even worship by consumers. A
large majority of consumers agree that they are willing to pay
more for a brand when they feel a personal connection to the
company.

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Figure 5.3 Conceptualizing Involvement

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Measuring Involvement
Table 5.1 A Scale to Measure Involvement

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Types of Involvement
• Product involvement is a consumer’s level of interest in a
particular product.
• Message involvement refers to the influence media
vehicles have on the consumers.
• Situational involvement takes place with a store, website,
or a location where people consume a product or service.

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Product Involvement
• Perceived risk
• Mass customization
• Brand loyalty
• Variety seeking

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Five Types of Perceived Risk
• Monetary risk
• Functional risk
• Physical risk
• Social risk
• Psychological risk

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Figure 5.4
Five Types
of
Perceived
Risk

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Message Involvement
• Alternate reality games (thousands of people participate in
a fictional story or competition to solve a mystery.)
• Narrative transportation (people become immersed in the
storyline.)

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For Reflection (3 of 4)
• What risky products have you considered recently?
• Which forms of risk were involved?

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For Reflection (4 of 4)
• Have you ever been immersed into an advertisement that
you feel like you are part of it?

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For Review
• Products can satisfy a range of consumer needs.
• Consumers experience a range of affective responses to
products and marketing messages.
• The way we evaluate and choose a product depends on
our degree of involvement with the product, the marketing
message, or the purchase situation.

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Copyright

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