Attitudes and Intentions

What is an Attitude?
• A key concept taken from psychology.
• Has at least 100 definitions and 500 measures.
• The most common definition is “Attitude as a
person’s overall evaluation as a concept”.
• Attitudes can be measures simply and directly by
asking consumers to evaluate the concept of
interest.
• E.g . Marketers may ask a consumer to indicate their
attitude towards Mc Donald,s on 3 evaluative scales.
Extremely -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 Extremely
Unfavorable favorable

Dislike -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 Likes
Very much Very Much

Very Bad -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 Very Good

 Attitudes toward what?
• Consumers can have attitude towards various
physical and social objects.

• Marketing Implications- Brand attitude is a key

aspect of brand equity. Brand equity concerns
the value of the brand to the marketer and the
consumer.
 Salient Beleifs
• Through their varied experiences, consumers
acquire beliefs about products, brands, and other
objects in their environment. These beliefs
constitute an associative network of linked
meanings stored in memory.
• Because cognitive capacity is limited only a few
beliefs can be activated and consciously
considered at once.
• The activated beliefs are known as Salient beliefs.
• Only the salient beliefs about an object create
a person’s attitude towards that object.
• One key to understand consumers’ attitude is
to identify and understand the underlying set
of salient beliefs.
The multi attribute Attitude model
• Martin Fishbein’s model is the most used.
• The typical number of salient beliefs are
expected to exceed 7 to 9. this will depend on
the level of involvement. Low level of
involvement will mean lesser salient beliefs.