Consumer Behavior Test #3

Informal Sources

A person whom the message receiver knows personally, such as a parent or friend, or an individual met online, who provides the receiver with product information and advice.

Sleeper Effect

A person's disassociation of the message from its source over time, which results in remembering only the message's content, but not its source.

Need for Humor

A person's tendency to enjoy, engage in, or seek out amusement.

Need for Cognition

A personality trait that reflects a person's craving for or enjoyment of thinking.

Sensation Seeking

A personality traits that is closely related to OSL and reflects one's need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take risks for the sake of such experiences.

Low-involvement Purchases

Purchases are not very important to the consumer, hold little relevance, have little perceived risk, and, thus, provoke very limited information processing.

High-Involvement Purchases

Purchases that are very important to the consumer and provoke a lot of perceived risk, and extensive problem solving and information processing.

Formal Sources

A communication source that speaks on behalf of a company, such as an endorser, salesperson, or advertiser.

Environmental Triggers

Cues in the environment that remind a person of something.

Persuasion Effects

Measures that indicate whether the message was received, understood, and interpreted correctly.

Sales Effects

Measures that indicate whether the messages of a given campaign have generated the sales level defined in the campaign's objectives.

Two-sided Message

A message that acknowledges competing products and/or the negatives of one's own product or brand.

Value-expressive Function

A functional approach to studying attitudes where researchers believe that attitudes reflect people's values and beliefs.

Differential Decay

A cognitive phenomenon where the memory of a low-credibility source decays faster than the contents of the message received from the source.

Knowledge Function

A functional approach to studying attitudes where researchers maintain that people form attitudes because they have a strong need to understand the characters of the people, events, and objects they encounter.

Ego-defensive Function

A functional approach to understanding attitudes where researchers believe that people replace doubt with feelings of security and confidence.

Utilitarian Function

A functional approach to understanding attitudes where researchers believe that that consumers' attitudes reflect the utilities that brands provide.

Attitude

A learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way toward a given object.

Sensory Store

A location in the brain where the sensory input lasts for just a second or two. If it is not processed immediately, it is lost.

Semantic Differential Scales

A measure consisting of a series of bipolar adjectives (such as "good/bad," "hot/cold," "like/dislike," or "expensive/inexpensive") anchored at the ends of an odd-numbered (e.g., five- or seven-point) continuum.

Media Exposure Effects

A measure of how many consumers were exposed to the message and their characteristics.

Brand Loyalty

A measure of how often consumers buy a given brand, whether or not they switch brands and, if they do, how often, and the extent of their commitment to buying the brand regularly.

Self-perception Attribution

A mental interpretation that reflects the way people see themselves when they form causalities about prior events, which consists of internal and external attributions.

One-sided Message

A message that provides only the positives of a product or brand, and/or the negatives of the competitor's brand. The message presents only one side of an argument.

Tri-component Attitude Model

A model describing the structure of attitudes, it maintains that an attitude consists of three components.

Starch Readership Ad Study

A research method that evaluates the effectiveness of magazine advertisements along three criteria: "Noticing" the ad, "associating" the ad with the brand advertised, and "involvement" with the ad (defined as having read most of the ad's text).

Information Overload

A situation that occurs when consumers receive too much information and find it difficult to encode and store it.

Source Credibility

A source's persuasive impact, stemming from its perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and believability.

Foot-in-the-door Techniques

A strategy aimed at changing attitudes consisting of getting people to agree to a large request after convincing them to agree to a small and modest request first.

Door-in-the-face Technique

A strategy aimed at changing attitudes where a large and costly first request—that is likely refused—is followed by a second, more realistic, and less costly request.

Attribution Theory

A theory focused on how people assign causality to events and form or alter their attitudes after assessing their own or other people's behavior.

Hemispheric Lateralization (Split Brain Theory)

A theory whose premise is that the human brain is divided into two distinct cerebral hemispheres that operate together, but "specialize" in processing different types of cognitions. The left hemisphere is the center of human language; it is the linear side of the brain and primarily responsible for reading, speaking, and reasoning. The right hemisphere of the brain is the home of spatial perception and nonverbal concepts; it is nonlinear and the source of imagination and pleasure.

Experiential Ads

Allow customers to engage and interact with products and services in sensory ways and to create emotional bonds between consumers and brands.

Comparative Advertising

An advertising appeal where marketers proclaim that their products are better than competing brands named in the ads.

Functional Approach

An approach to changing attitudes by appealing to the reasons (or motivations) behind people's attitudes. These reasons are called "functions."

Primacy Effect

An indication that material presented first during communications is more noticeable and persuasive than subsequent materials.

Recency Effect

An indication that the material presented last during communications is more noticeable and persuasive than preceding materials.

Word-of-mouth

An oral or written communication in which satisfied customers tell others how much they like a business, product, service, or event.

Encoding

Assigning a word or visual image in order to represent an object during communications.

Podcasts

Audio stories that can be saved and played on a computer or smartphone that rely almost entirely on advertising dollars.

Message Framing

Either stresses the benefits of using the product (positive framing) or the benefits to be lost by not using the product (negative framing).

Time Shift

Electronic devices that enable consumers to skip commercials by pausing and resuming play during live broadcasts, or recording programs and viewing them later on.

Defensive Attribution

Behavior or thoughts that occur when people accept (or take) credit for success (internal attribution), but assign failure to others or outside events (external attribution).

Post-purchase Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance that occurs after a purchase.

Psychological Noise

Competing advertising messages or distracting thoughts that impact the reception of promotional messages.

Selective Exposure

Consumers seeking out sympathetic, pleasant messages and deliberately avoiding messages that they find painful or threatening.

Observational Learning (Modeling)

Learning that occurs when people observe and later imitate observed behaviors.

Infomercials

Long commercials that appear to be documentaries rather than advertisements.

Recall Tests/ Unaided Recall

Measures the effectiveness of learning and communications, where consumers are asked whether or not they have read a particular magazine or have watched a particular TV show. Afterwards, they are asked whether they can recall any of the ads featured in these media and their salient points.

Recognition Test/ Aided Recall

Measures the effectiveness of learning and communications, where consumers are shown ads and asked whether or not they remember seeing them and can recall any of their salient points.

Interpersonal Communications

Messages sent by either formal sources (e.g., a salesperson in a physical or virtual retail location) or informal sources (e.g., peers with whom the consumer communicates face to face or via electronic means).

Impersonal Communications

Messages that companies (formal sources) develop and transmit through their marketing departments, advertising or public relations agencies, and spokespersons.

Multi-attribute Attitude Models

Models that portray consumers' attitudes as functions of their assessments of the objects' prominent attributes.

Advertorials

Printed ads that closely resemble content and editorial material.

Branded Content

Promotional messages designed to blend within the content in which they are "planted," such as articles, entertainment, and news, by resembling the content and disguising advertising—their true identity. Also known as Native Advertising.

Limited Problem Solving

Purchase decisions where consumers buy updated versions of products they have bought before and have set criteria to evaluate these items.

Extensive Problem Solving

Purchase situations that occur infrequently and where the consumer does not have prior criteria to evaluate the product considered.

Self-Image

Self-image is defined as how people perceive themselves.

Comparative Ads

The ads used in comparative advertising, more likely to be processed centrally (purposeful processing of message arguments)

Consumer Involvement

The degree of personal relevance that the product or purchase holds for the consumer.

Cognitive Component

The first component of the Tri-Component Model of attitudes. It represents the person's knowledge and perceptions of the features of the attitude object, which, collectively, are the beliefs that the object possesses or does not possess specific attributes.

Brand Equity

The intrinsic value of a brand name, which stems from consumers' perception of the brand's superiority, the social esteem that using it provides, and the customers' trust and identification with the brand.

Cognitive Dissonance

The mental discomfort that people experience when facing conflicting information about an attitude object.

Cognitive Learning

The premise that learning occurs in the form of sequential, mental processing of information when people face problems that they wish to resolve.

Positioning

The process by which a company creates a distinct image and identity for its products, services, and brands in consumers' minds. The image differentiates the company's offering from competition by communicating to the target audience that the product, service, or brand fulfills the target consumers' needs better than alternatives.

Data Retrieval

The process by which people recover information from the long-term store, that is frequently triggered by external cues.

Data Chunking

The process during which consumers recode what they have already encoded, which often results in recalling additional relevant information. "Chunks" are groupings of information.

Communication

The process of imparting or exchanging information. In the context of consumer behavior, it is the transmission of messages from senders (the sources) to receivers (the consumers) via media (the channels of transmission).

Data Rehearsal

The process that information in the short-term store undergoes, in the form of silent, mental repetition of information, after which the information is transferred to the long-term store.

Affective Component

The second component of the Tri-Component Model of attitudes. It represents the person's emotions and feelings regarding the attitude object, which are considered evaluations because they capture the person's overall assessment of the attitude object (i.e., the extent to which the individual rates the attitude object as "favorable" or "unfavorable," "good" or "bad")

Sensory Input

The stimuli that are received and perceived from our five senses: smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound.

Conative Component

The third component of the Tri-Component Model of attitudes. It represents the likelihood that an individual will behave in a particular way with regard to the attitude object. In consumer behavior, the conative component is treated as an expression of the consumer's intention to buy.