Marketing communication: principles and practice

C O N S U M E R B E H A V I O U R A N D C O M M U N I C A T I O N
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Table 3.4
Understanding consumer actions
Action
Approach
Important vs. trivial choice
A 
cognitive approach
to understanding 
decision-making is relevant
New vs. repeated actions
A 
learning approach
is helpful to understanding 
habit and desensitization
Free vs. constrained
Attribution theory
helps to explain why some of 
us do not try to change our behaviour
Individual vs. group-based
Social influence can be understood by 
examining behaviour with 
exchange theory
Source
: East, 1997

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are consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and consumer complaining
behaviour, discussed later in this chapter.
Attribution
When things don’t go the way we want them to, we can blame ourselves
(internal attribution) or the situation (external attribution). We tend to see
our social situation as predictable and controllable and to make the same
kinds of predictions about social phenomena as about physical phenomena.
The conditions for events to occur may be situational or impersonal, or
regarded as internal to yourself or others, such as ability or personality
(Heider, 1958). There are two components in any judgement – the basic
nature of the situation, and the frame we use to interpret that situation. People
use different frames, and advertising is intended to change interpretative
frames (see Figure 3.9).
Social influences
The theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1988) sees the determinants of a
person’s intention to perform a voluntary action as:
• the perceived gains and losses
• the beliefs about what other important people think about the action
• the ‘perceived’ conditions that make the action more, or less, easy to
perform
From the cognitive perspective, people act out roles as sets of mutually related
expectations about how they should act in relation to others and vice versa.