 Hi, welcome. My name is Dr. Marcy Stone and this is Unit 4, Influencing Consumer Attitudes of Your Consumer Behavior Course. This course has 10 units and Unit 4 is on Influencing Consumer Attitudes. Here are the Unit 4 learning outcomes. So we have to explain why it's important for consumer researchers to understand the nature and power of attitudes, identify how we use attitude models to identify specific components for predicting a consumer's overall attitude toward a product or brand, identify how the structure of the message determines how persuasive it will be, and assess why audience characteristics help to determine whether the nature of the source or the message itself will be relatively more effective. Why are learning outcomes so important? So every learning outcome ties back to course materials and content. This includes your assessment and also test preparation. These are the overview topics for this presentation in this unit. So we have nature and power of consumer attitudes models, structure of the marketing message, and then we have audience characteristics and message. And then we have the vocabulary terms for this presentation that we'll cover in this presentation. So now we have nature and power of consumer attitudes. Our attitudes control our buying decisions, thoughts we might have about a product or a brand, and how much time we might spend researching. And because these attitudes change frequently over the course of our lives, marketing has become more focused on segmentation to analyze where people are in their lives and what advertising might work best at that time. A marketing research study might include focus groups, surveys, observations, or interviewing potential customers to determine what they think about products or brands. When a consumer has a positive attitude about a brand or a product, they're going to be more open to commercials about that industry. For example, if as a child you loved eating cereal and developed a positive attitude about cereal and as an adult you may also love eating cereal. This positive association may help you to be more open to cereal commercials that you loved as a child and that you still love today. So understanding these consumer attitudes will help you to successfully promote products and brands. Now we have consumer attitude models. So one consumer attitude model that's used in marketing is called the ABC model of attitudes. And this includes three parts. We have effective, which is feelings and emotions, behavioral, which is response tendencies based on past and future, and cognitive thoughts or cognitive, which is thoughts and beliefs. When all parts are aligned, a consumer's attitude is stronger. For example, most people love their country and they feel patriotic and positive about their country, and then their behavior and their thoughts will also support that belief. The more that these feelings, behaviors, and thoughts are aligned with this example, the stronger that they feel about their country. So the three parts of attitudes include our feelings and emotions that help us to show effective attitudes. So for example, we may feel connected to products that we used when we were younger. Although it may not apply to our real life today, we may still purchase those products because of those feelings. And then how we act or what we would like to do is considered our behavioral attitude. And for example, we may intend to attend a local art festival this weekend, or we may intend to celebrate July 4 weekend with family. We may intend to purchase a new car soon because we're having issues with the current car. These are our intentions. And then finally, we have cognitive. So our thoughts and beliefs are our cognitive attitudes. These are beliefs that we have about a topic. So sometimes we may adopt our beliefs because of someone else. Our parents or our friends may have mentioned their beliefs, which sounded like a good idea to us. So we adopted these views as our own. And then here we have a little bit of a graph about the ABC models of attitudes. So overall, you have your attitude or your overall evaluation. And this example is towards composting. So we see here where we have effective, which is our feelings and emotional. And this example is composting is important to me. And then we have behavioral, which includes your past and future activity. And here we might say, I compost wherever I go. And then in the third one, we have cognitive. These are our thoughts and our beliefs. And then it talks about composting and how it reduces CO2 emissions. So the more that these three things are aligned, the stronger that a consumer feels about a certain subject. We talked about patriotism, and now you can see this from someone who's it's really important to them to compost. So if you, the more aligned that these things, these three things are, the more the stronger that someone will feel about that. And now we have the structure of the marketing message. So whether we realize it or not, or if we see hundreds, if not thousands that we see, I guess I should have said, if we see hundreds, if not thousands of marketing messages every day, our brains sort through this media and we unconsciously choose to ignore or focus in on certain topics. And this effect influences our purchasing decisions. If we trust the source of the message, the more likely we are to listen. Marketers can also use fear and humor to attract customers. Trust characteristics might include a perceived authority, honesty and likability. Perceived authority may be the people that we believe are experts on a specific. So for example, you may trust a mechanic that you've been taking your car to for a decade. Honesty is another factor that we take into consideration. For example, the more honest an individual seems, the more we may listen. And then likability is another factor that we may take into consideration during the consumer buying process. The more that we like someone, the more likable or the more likely we are to believe that person. Likeability, likable people also create general feelings. Sorry, likable people also create genuine feelings that allow us to trust that individual. Okay, and then we have audience characteristics and message. Effective marketing may include emotional, cognitive and physical attraction to influence the buying process. For example, emotional marketing might include a homeless dog that has been mistreated. This type of marketing appeals to dog owners who feel an emotional connection and donate money to a dog shelter. Physical attraction or physical appeal marketing influences a consumer by using an attractive model to promote a product, service or brand. For example, if you join a gym to lose some weight, a trainer may be attractive and you may be more likely to accept advice from the trainer as a result. The last type of effective marketing is cognitive and is presented to someone who has an extensive knowledge about a subject. For example, your doctor may be somebody that you trust because they have a high level of education and experience. Okay, so here are the unit for learning outcomes. So we discussed why it's important for consumer researchers to understand the nature and power of attitudes. We looked at one of the attitude models. We also looked at why the structure of the message determines how persuasive it will be. And then we looked at audience characteristics that help them to determine the nature of the source of the message and how it might be more effective. So what's next? Unit 5 is on the purchasing process. So my name is Dr. Marcy Stone and I just wanted to say thank you for listening.