Chapter 5: Motivation and Emotion: Driving Consumer Behaviour
Motivations: The inner reasons or driving forces behind human action as consumers are
driven to address real needs.
Homeostasis: refers to the fact that the body naturally reacts in a way to maintain a
constant, normal bloodstream.
• Consumers act to maintain things the way they are, and their wants are a function
of the need driven by homeostasis.
The second group of behaviours results from self-improvement. These behaviours are
aimed at changing one’s current state to a level that is more ideal – not simply
maintaining the current state of existence.
• Leads consumers to perform acts that cause emotions that help create hedonic
value.
Regulatory Focus Theory: consumers orient their behaviour through either a prevention
or a promotion focus.
• A prevention focus orients consumers toward avoiding negative consequences,
while a promotion focus orients consumers towards the opportunistic pursuit of
aspirations or ideals.
Note: The inner reasons or driving forces behind human action as consumers are driven to
address real needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: a theory of human motivation that describes consumers as
addressing a finite set of prioritized needs.
• Physiological: basic survival.
• Safety and Security: the need to be secure and protected.
• Belongingness and Love: the need to feel like a member of a family or community.
• Esteem: the need to be recognized as a person of worth.
• Self-Actualization: the need for personal fulfilment.
Utilitarian Motivation: drive to acquire products that can be used to accomplish
something.
Hedonic Motivation: drive to experience something emotionally gratifying.
,Consumer Involvement
Consumer involvement represents the degree of personal relevance a consumer finds in
pursuing value from a given category of consumption.
Moderating Variable: is one that changes the nature of a relationship between two other
variables.
Note: a highly involved consumer is likely to take more time because he or she recognizes a
greater number of attractive alternatives.
• Product Involvement: the personal relevance of a particular product category.
• Product Enthusiast: consumers with very high involvement in some product
category.
• Shopping Involvement: personal relevance of shopping activities.
• Situational Involvement: temporary interest in some imminent purchase
situation.
• Enduring involvement: ongoing interest in some product or opportunity.
• Emotional Involvement: type of deep personal interest that evokes strongly felt
feelings simply from the thoughts or behaviour associated with some object or
activity.
Emotion
Emotions are specific psychobiological reactions to appraisals. Psychobiological: a
response involving both psychological and physical human responses.
Visceral Responses: certain feeling states that are tied to physical reactions/behaviour in
a very direct way.
Cognitive Appraisal Theory: theory proposing that specific types of appraisal thoughts
can be linked to specific types of emotions.
Four Types of cognitive appraisal are especially relevant for consumer behaviour:
1. Anticipation appraisal: focuses on the future and can elicit emotions like
hopefulness or anxiety.
2. Agency appraisal: reviews responsibility for events and can evoke gratefulness,
frustration, guilt, or sadness.
3. Equity appraisal: considers how fair some event is and can evoke emotions like
warmth or anger.
4. Outcomes appraisals: considers how something turned out relative to one’s goals
and can evoke emotions like joyfulness satisfaction, sadness, or pride.
, Mood: can be thought of as a transient (temporary and changing) and general feeling state
often characterized with simple descriptors such as a “good mood” or a “bad mood”.
• Moods are considered less intense than many other emotional experiences.
Consumers make mood-congruent judgements, an evaluation in which the value of a
target is influences in a consistent way by one’s mood.
• Consumer affect: feelings a consumer has about a particular product or activity.
Measuring Emotions
Autonomic Measures: are those responses that are automatically recorded based on
either automatic visceral reactions or neurological brain activity.
Self-report measures are generally less obtrusive than biological measures because they
don’t involve physical contraptions. Self-report affect measures usually require
consumers to recall their affect state from a recent experience.
PANAS (Positive Affect – Negative Affect Scale): self-report measure that asks respondents
to rate the extent to which they feel one of twenty emotional adjectives.
Note: researchers generally apply the PANAS to capture the relative amount of positive and
negative emotion experienced by a consumer at a given point in time.
PAD (Pleasure Arousal Dominance Scale): self-report measure that asks respondents to
rate feelings using semantic differential items; acronym stands for pleasure–arousal–
dominance.
Emotional Expressiveness: extent to which a consumer shows outward behavioural signs
and otherwise reacts obviously to emotional experiences.
Emotional Intelligence: awareness of the emotions experienced in a given situation and
the ability to control reactions to these emotions. Consists of self-control, emotional
empathy, optimistic outlook, productive.
Semantic Wiring
A consumer’s ability to remember things about brands and products can be explained
using theory developed around the principles of semantic or associative networks.
Although the term semantic is more closely tied to cognitive thought processes, the active
processing and storage of knowledge is significantly influenced by emotions in several
ways.
Motivations: The inner reasons or driving forces behind human action as consumers are
driven to address real needs.
Homeostasis: refers to the fact that the body naturally reacts in a way to maintain a
constant, normal bloodstream.
• Consumers act to maintain things the way they are, and their wants are a function
of the need driven by homeostasis.
The second group of behaviours results from self-improvement. These behaviours are
aimed at changing one’s current state to a level that is more ideal – not simply
maintaining the current state of existence.
• Leads consumers to perform acts that cause emotions that help create hedonic
value.
Regulatory Focus Theory: consumers orient their behaviour through either a prevention
or a promotion focus.
• A prevention focus orients consumers toward avoiding negative consequences,
while a promotion focus orients consumers towards the opportunistic pursuit of
aspirations or ideals.
Note: The inner reasons or driving forces behind human action as consumers are driven to
address real needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: a theory of human motivation that describes consumers as
addressing a finite set of prioritized needs.
• Physiological: basic survival.
• Safety and Security: the need to be secure and protected.
• Belongingness and Love: the need to feel like a member of a family or community.
• Esteem: the need to be recognized as a person of worth.
• Self-Actualization: the need for personal fulfilment.
Utilitarian Motivation: drive to acquire products that can be used to accomplish
something.
Hedonic Motivation: drive to experience something emotionally gratifying.
,Consumer Involvement
Consumer involvement represents the degree of personal relevance a consumer finds in
pursuing value from a given category of consumption.
Moderating Variable: is one that changes the nature of a relationship between two other
variables.
Note: a highly involved consumer is likely to take more time because he or she recognizes a
greater number of attractive alternatives.
• Product Involvement: the personal relevance of a particular product category.
• Product Enthusiast: consumers with very high involvement in some product
category.
• Shopping Involvement: personal relevance of shopping activities.
• Situational Involvement: temporary interest in some imminent purchase
situation.
• Enduring involvement: ongoing interest in some product or opportunity.
• Emotional Involvement: type of deep personal interest that evokes strongly felt
feelings simply from the thoughts or behaviour associated with some object or
activity.
Emotion
Emotions are specific psychobiological reactions to appraisals. Psychobiological: a
response involving both psychological and physical human responses.
Visceral Responses: certain feeling states that are tied to physical reactions/behaviour in
a very direct way.
Cognitive Appraisal Theory: theory proposing that specific types of appraisal thoughts
can be linked to specific types of emotions.
Four Types of cognitive appraisal are especially relevant for consumer behaviour:
1. Anticipation appraisal: focuses on the future and can elicit emotions like
hopefulness or anxiety.
2. Agency appraisal: reviews responsibility for events and can evoke gratefulness,
frustration, guilt, or sadness.
3. Equity appraisal: considers how fair some event is and can evoke emotions like
warmth or anger.
4. Outcomes appraisals: considers how something turned out relative to one’s goals
and can evoke emotions like joyfulness satisfaction, sadness, or pride.
, Mood: can be thought of as a transient (temporary and changing) and general feeling state
often characterized with simple descriptors such as a “good mood” or a “bad mood”.
• Moods are considered less intense than many other emotional experiences.
Consumers make mood-congruent judgements, an evaluation in which the value of a
target is influences in a consistent way by one’s mood.
• Consumer affect: feelings a consumer has about a particular product or activity.
Measuring Emotions
Autonomic Measures: are those responses that are automatically recorded based on
either automatic visceral reactions or neurological brain activity.
Self-report measures are generally less obtrusive than biological measures because they
don’t involve physical contraptions. Self-report affect measures usually require
consumers to recall their affect state from a recent experience.
PANAS (Positive Affect – Negative Affect Scale): self-report measure that asks respondents
to rate the extent to which they feel one of twenty emotional adjectives.
Note: researchers generally apply the PANAS to capture the relative amount of positive and
negative emotion experienced by a consumer at a given point in time.
PAD (Pleasure Arousal Dominance Scale): self-report measure that asks respondents to
rate feelings using semantic differential items; acronym stands for pleasure–arousal–
dominance.
Emotional Expressiveness: extent to which a consumer shows outward behavioural signs
and otherwise reacts obviously to emotional experiences.
Emotional Intelligence: awareness of the emotions experienced in a given situation and
the ability to control reactions to these emotions. Consists of self-control, emotional
empathy, optimistic outlook, productive.
Semantic Wiring
A consumer’s ability to remember things about brands and products can be explained
using theory developed around the principles of semantic or associative networks.
Although the term semantic is more closely tied to cognitive thought processes, the active
processing and storage of knowledge is significantly influenced by emotions in several
ways.
