Values

Involvement, Values and Attitudes

The objective of today's lecture was to learn and understand how a persons level of motivation and degree of involvement affect their behaviour and furthermore understand how that persons values and attitudes also affect their behaviour and then to show how a marketer can exploit this and use it to their advantage.

Values are defined as the the ideals, customs, institutions etc of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive such as cleanliness, freedom or education, or negative such as cruelty crime or blasphemy.

"If we believe our overall values drive our behaviour, then we should be concentrating on the important, underlying motives that drive consumers to make product or service choices rather than simply product attributes" (Reis and Trout 1985).

When it comes to marketing and linking this with consumer involvement, values will have a greater impact on those products which require high involvement this is because people have specific terminal values or end states and many of the products and services purchased will help to attain that persons value related goal, that could be any of the following according to Kahles list of values:

1. Self respect


2. Excitement


3. Being well respected


4. Self-fulfilment


5. Sense of accomplishment

1. Warm relationship with others


2. Security

1. Fun and enjoyment


2. Sense of belonging

For example being well respected for some people can mean having the latest gadgets i.e mobile phones and cars, and these people believe that the high end goods will gain respect. Alongside this people may then feel a sense of accomplishment once attaining these goods they have aspired to. Research shows that in 1967 the most important value to people was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life with the least important being to become an expert in finance and eccomerce. Whereas in 1985, a mear 18 years later, the most imprtant value to people was to be well off financially and the least important being to clean up the environment. But why is it that we have become a world obsessed with money...perhaps people are getting to carried away with their aspirations that they are concentrating to much on the materialisitc things in life rather than the really important things in life such as family etc.

Personally my values have been shaped through the different stages in my life and through the different experiences i have gone through, which is how it will work for most people. Everyone will have different values and different orders of importance for things in their lives. My family and friends impact my values on security, sense of belonging and warm relationships with others, and if my relationships with family and friends change then subsequently so will my values. With this in mind i believe that along with our values changing over time so do the ways in which we make purchase decisions.

Below is an advert which i feel shows sense of accomplishment:



Click on the link to see an advert that shows a sense of belonging: The AA Vintage TV ad.

Below you will see the VALS framework. VALS is 'a marketing and consulting tool that helps businesses worldwide develop and execute more effective strategies. The system identifies current and future opportunitites by segmenting the consumer market place on the basis of personality traits that drive consumer behaviour'. So the aim of the VALS test is to measure the underlying psychological motovations and resources that many consumers share that predict each groups typical choice as consumers.



After taking the VALS test myself the results showed that i am an innovator. Innovators are said to be successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem. They are a very active consumer, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products or services. Image is also important to the innovator, not through power or status but as an expression of taste, independance and personality. Their lives are characterised by variety. Their possesions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life. For me this is weirdly funny because when my mum asks me to justify why i spend so much money on nice clothes, shoes, etc i reply with "Its because i like the finer things in life".
My secondary type is the experiencer, motivated through self-expression. A young, enthusiastic and impulsive consumer. Experiencers are avid consumers and spend a comparatively high proportion of their income on fashion, entertainment and socialising. This would be spot on for me!! Take the test for yourself by following this link: The VALS survey.