Consumer Attitude Formation and Behavior

Introduction

Making public awareness is very important in our day to day lives. To be successful in creating consciousness, the most suitable awareness creation approaches must be used. Awareness campaigners must be sure that the method they are using is appropriate and thus help take the intended message home. This paper analyses a case study of awareness creation.

Various types of learning can be used in education and awareness campaign. One of them is environmental publishing as used in the case study that makes use of logos and posters mounted onto objects in the environment (Anderson, 2017). Another learning type is the use of radio soap operas. This approach essentially reaches a wide range of people and is convincing. Other means learning kinds are door to door canvassing, web blogs, puppet shows, tree sitting and protest marches.

About campaign effectiveness, message involvement has several significances. From the case study, it is evident that after message involvement was employed in the ‘Beware Rhino Campaign’ the number of accidents reduced by 20%. That indicates that message involvement promotes the better acquisition of the message. The target audience which is the youth in the case study has been able to take the message in a friendly manner with the feeling that the message belongs to them (Xiang, 2014). It also improves message acquisition by making the target audience make sense out of the message. It makes them think on their own and make sense out of the message.

Sometimes directing the message to one segment or a particular group of the audience may not be useful in controlling specific behaviors. Some practices are universal and thus the need to develop message dissemination strategies that target the entire population contrary to what has been done in the case study. Firstly, use of a language that cuts across birth the youth and the adult is vital (Habibi, 2015). The case study used language that suited only youth like the ‘Recycle Me’ campaign. If universal symbols are used, then adults will adopt the desired behaviors. Again, use of universal media will help so much. Older adults do not spend much of their time on social media and other interaction sites (Cantallops, 2017). Therefore, the use of radio, TV or any other form of mass media would help older adults acquire the message with ease.

Using authoritative voice in message disseminated is not very effective because the audience usually gets used to the threats and ignore the message. Water rationing will be best tackled using the approach mentioned earlier. The campaigns against wastage of water would be suitably carried out using non-authoritative voice. Another case where this approach can be used is tackling lung diseases as it has been used in England (Claiborne, 2016). Anti-lung disease campaigns perform better when not conducted using authoritative voice.

Conclusion

While awareness creation is essential, it is crucial to choose the best approach. Adopting the wrong approach leads to campaign failure as the target audience does not acquire the message as required. Conclusively, the use of non-authoritative approach has proven workable in awareness campaigns and therefore recommended for all awareness campaigners.

References

Anderson, P. (2017). Consumer behavior in East/West cultures: Implications for marketing a consumer durable. In Proceedings of the 1996 Multicultural Marketing Conference, 4 (8), 56-67.

Cantallops, A. (2017). New consumer behavior: A review of research on eWOM and hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 4 (8), 65-78.

Claiborne, C. (2016). Self-image congruence as a model of consumer attitude formation and behavior: A conceptual review and guide for future research. In Proceedings of the 1990 academy of marketing science (AMS) annual conference, 4 (6), 43-56.

Habibi, M. (2015). Testing an extended model of consumer behavior in the context of social media-based brand communities. Computers in Human Behavior, 3 (7), 54-76.

Xiang, Z. (2014). Information technology and consumer behavior in travel and tourism: Insights from travel planning using the internet. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 5 (8), 73-87.