Involvement and Sports Brand Advertising

Involvement and Sports Brand Advertising



Involvement and Sports Brand Advertising

Part 1:

Consumer behavior is defined as the behavior that consumers display in seeking, purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their personal needs. Consumer behavior includes how consumers think (their mental decisions) and feel, and the physical actions that result from these decisions (the purchase). Both low and high involvement purchases are basically aimed to satisfy these needs. Normally however, low involvement purchases usually act to satisfy the lower-order needs while high involvement purchases act to satisfy the higher-order needs.

Involvement has been found to be a moderating factor in ad processing. Specifically, drama or argument ads may have a greater impact on consumer information processing under varying levels of product involvement. Such involvement should also moderate the persuasiveness of ad forms. As a drama ad appeals to subjective truth, we expect expression of feelings and conviction of its verisimilitude to occur with an audience with low involvement. Hence, persuasion of drama ads under low involvement is evidenced by a positive relationship between expression of feelings and conviction of verisimilitude with expression of belief in the ads. For argument ads, there is less appeal to subjective truth, resulting in minimal expression of feelings and verisimilitude. Thus, their persuasiveness under conditions of low involvement will be lower as evidenced by a smaller positive relationship between expression of feelings and verisimilitude with expression of belief (Wheatley, John J. & Oshikawa, Sadaomi 1970).

In contrast, a highly involved audience would require cogent arguments to be persuaded of the ad's value. Thus, drama ads would not be persuasive as argument ads. Hence, no relationship between expressions of belief is expected with expression of feelings or verisimilitude under high involvement-drama condition. Exposure to argument ads under high involvement would lead to the generation of more cognitive responses and greater expression of belief but few expressions of feelings and verisimilitude. Hence, under such circumstances, there will also be no relationship between expression of feelings and verisimilitude with expression of belief (Haug, 1971).

One model of consumer persuasion is the Elaboration Likelihood model that divides persuasive approaches into two categories/routes, central and peripheral. The central route likely receives a cognitive response from the viewer; thinking actively about the 'message', finding it more persuasive and interesting, this route often uses the fear and guilt appeals. The peripheral route receives a response through 'peripheral cues'; through the 'form' of the ad, such as its uses of gaining attention (attractiveness) and its associations, this route will often use the sex, humour, nostalgia and celebrity endorsement appeals (Solomon, 2004, p256). Whether the consumer follows the central or peripheral route depends on whether the advert is 'high involvement' or 'low involvement'. Involvement refers to “the level of perceived personal importance and/or interest evoked by a stimulus (or stimuli) within a specific situation” (Solomon, 2004, p111)

A high involvement advert will have direct or high relevance to our needs and desires, and therefore we will be more ...