10.2 Involvement
Two overarching frameworks in this stream of research are:
- Elaboration LIkelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1979)
- Heuristic-Systematic Model H(Chaiken 1980)
Involvement as a key moderator in advertising effectiveness
From the ELM by (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) by use the word “motivation” in place of involvement. And if you use the term “motivation”, reviewers are less likely to fight with you since involvement is so fragmented
For review and operationalization, check (Muehling, Laczniak, and Andrews 1993) (preferable) or (Andrews, Durvasula, and Akhter 1990) and famous scale is (“Personal Involvement Inventory” 1985)
Possible manipulation of involvement:
- ego-involvement: how a product is relevant to you (e.g., pick a free product for you, or for others)
Involvement roughly means “How deeply you are as a consumer wants to think about a product,”
Motivation (2) Opportunity (kinda under ability in the original ELM, we as marketers separate this factor) (3) Ability are necessary for elaboration likelihood model (Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983)
Defensive processing is not fully captured under the ELM model: Motivation: not the desire to think, but also the desire to find out the truth, assuming that consumers want to find out the truth.
Involvement vs. Engagement:
- According to (Greenwald and Leavitt 1984) (p. 583), define audience involvement and actor involvement (should be called engagement).
derived from Sherif & Hovland (1961) Social Judgment (ego-involvement)
Enduring involvement vs. situational involvement (Houston & Rothschild, 1977) (A Paradigm for Research on Consumer Involvement)
Four levels of involvement:
Preattention: little capacity
Focal attention: modest capacity to decipher the message
Comprehension: more capacity to analyze the message
Elaboration: most capacity to integrate the message into the audience’s knowledge.
Antecedents: Situational involvement
Consequences:
Under high involvement: communication can modify beliefs
Under low involvement: communication affect perceptions, and can gradually be persuasive after repeated exposure.
Under ego-involvement: high involvement is more resistance to persuasion.
Processes of involvement:
High involvement creates link between new info to previous experience or attitude
differentiate high vs. involvement by central vs. peripheral routs to persuasion (Petty and Cacioppo 1986)
Mitchell (1979) equates high involvement to arousal/drive
Involvement stems from
Actor (participant) or audience (observer)
Distinction: Attentional capacity and attentional arousal
Arousal = “a state of wakefulness, general preparation, or excitement that facilitates the performance of well-leaned response.” (p. 583)
Capacity (also known as effort by Kahneman (1973)) = ” a limited resource that must be used to focus on a specific task and that is needed in increasing amounts as the cognitive complexity of a task increases.” (p. 583)
Levels of processing: influences long-term memories
Principles for the control of involvement:
Bottom-up (data-driven) processing
Top-down (concept-driven) processing
Competence (data) limitation
Capacity (resource) limitation
Effects of involvement
Immediate Effects: “analyze codes produced by prior processing”
Enduring Effects
Preattention: no definitive conclusion
Focal attention: (1) Familiar stimuli could be identified as separated objects and (2) Unfamiliar stimuli primes sensory memory traces
Comprehension: create traces at the propositional level of representation
Elaboration: “substantial freedom of memory and attitude from the specific details of th original message or its setting.”
Principle of higher-level dominance: the effect of the highest level of involvement is dominant in cases where the effects of different levels oppose one another.
Both routes can happen at the same time
deeper thinking, play judgment will dominate the net results (weights on whatever route is higher)
(Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983)
provides evidence for the two routes to persuasion
Central route: long-lasting and predictive of behavior
Peripheral route: associated with positive or negative cues , can be temporary and unpredictive of behavior.
Argument quality influences attitudes more under high than low involvement
Product endorsers (celebrities vs. joe) influences attitudes more under low than high involvement
Can use this as an example of (1) message content, and (2) executional cues (e.g., endorsers) can influence persuasiveness.
Mood affects cognitive elaboration, bias the argument quality, peripherally affect brand attitudes.
- Positive moods reduces elaboration
(Macinnis, Rao, and Weiss 2002)
Under ELM, for the endorsers to have an effect, customers have to have some motivation (require some levels of cognition), while affective processing does not require any motivation. Hence, for consumers have higher ability (know about products because it’s mature).
For mature brands, affectively based executional cues can induce sales
Advertisement with positive feelings induces sales
(“Consumer’s Engagement with Brand-Related Social-Media Content Scale” 2016)
Propose consumers’ engagement scales (in the context of social media)
Three dimensions of consumer’s engagement based on previous research Muntinga, Moorman, and Smit (2011)
Consumption (e.g., using)
Contribution: (e.g., liking or sharing, participating)
Creation: (e.g., posting, producing contents)
McQuarrie (1998): Meta analysis
Lab experiments (in advertising context) are different from real-world phenomenon because:
Forcing exposure
Failing to measure choice
does not consider competitive ads, decay, repeated exposures or mature/familiar brands.
(Muehling, Laczniak, and Andrews 1993)
A review on involvement in advertising research
See figure 1 (p. 43) for involvement conceptualization