Week 7- Attitudes

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

Attitudes are defined as being lasting, general evaluations. There is also an assumption in much of the literature and amongst academics that attitudes mediate behaviour.

Question 2

What does empirical evidence say about attitudes.

Answer 2

• they are neither lasting nor general and are similarly held between customers of competing brands
• suggesting that they are poor evaluative mechanisms (that is because there is little difference between the attitudes that people hold for the different brands they use

Question 3

Describe the correlation between attitudes and later behaviour?

Answer 3

Attitudes and later behaviours have been found to be poorly correlated. In fact the relationship between attitudes and previous behaviour is far stronger.

Question 4

Do consumers responses change in relation to attitudinal questions?

Answer 4

the individual level are fickle with around 50% of individuals changing their response to an attitudinal question when asked a second time (even if there is only a short period between first and second periods of data collection).

Question 5

Is there much use of attitudes

Answer 5

Because attitudes change so frequently, they are of little use as segmentation variables and have limited predictive ability.

Question 6

Attitudinal Repeat Rate (RR)

Answer 6

Response Level (RL) + 20.

Question 7

Methodology - Ranking & Rating

Answer 7

• Ranking - in order of most to least for an attribute

* Rating - give each brand a score for an attribute

Question 8

The Impact of Usage Of attitudes

Answer 8

Attitude scores vary in-line with brand share (bigger brands gain higher scores)
Users are more likely to state attitudes than non-users
Bigger brands have more users to express an attitude about the brand, compared with smaller brands
Those who express an attitude are effectively saying ‘I use/like the brand’

Question 9

What percentage of attitudes predict behaviour

Answer 9

Attitudes typically explain less than 10% of the variance in behaviour

Question 10

Expected patterns with attitudes

Answer 10

• For a new, growing brand if attitudes drive behaviour you would expect there to be many ‘intenders’ for the brand’s small market share
• For an old, dying brand there should be fewer than expected ‘intenders’ for the brand’s big market size

Question 11

Attitude Stability

Answer 11

• Relatively neglected area - very little individual level repetition of research is undertaken
• Despite aggregate response stability, there is significant variation in individuals’ responses
• People are inherently fickle!

Question 12

Explain what (RR=RL+20) means for the stability of attitudes.

Answer 12

Repeat Rate (RR) = Response Level (RL) plus twenty
Response Level (RL) - proportion of your sample who expressed a certain attitude. Repeat Rate (RR) - the proportion of that initial sub-sample who expressed the attitude, you repeated that attitude when asked again.
Generally find that 50% of individuals will change their response. Attitudes are therefore not all that stable.

Question 13

Patterns

Answer 13

• Larger brands score better, than smaller brands
• Size effect - larger brands simply have more customers saying so
• Largely influenced by the proportion of users of these brands. When looking at brand users, we see a similar proportion of respondents mentioning their brand for the attribute ‘Good Quality’

Question 14

Explain the graph below. Which of the two outliers is the new, growing brand and which is the dying brand? What does this graph show about the effect of past behaviour on purchase intentions?

Answer 14

This graph shows that changes in behaviour precede attitudinal response or intentions to buy. While you’d expect the ‘high intentions’ outlier to be the new brand with many people intending to buy it, this is in fact the dying brand. There are many past users who have bought this brand in the past and plan to continue to do so. Unfortunately not as many do actually continue to buy it, hence why it is declining. You’d expect the ‘low intentions’ outlier to be the dying brand as no one is actually intending to buy it in the future. However, this is actually the new, growing brand. There are no past users to express an intention to buy the brand, but more actually do than expected which is why it’s growing. The graph shows that intentions are actually a reflection of past behaviour. After we try something, we like it. If we continue to buy something and if someone asks, we would say that we intend to keep using it.