At the beginning of this module, I said that motives have strength as well as direction. Obviously, the strength of the motive is extremely important to us, consumers will work much harder and be much more motivated to satisfy a need that is extremely important or relevant in some way. And that's why the concept of involvement is really, really central to a lot of marketing decisions. The way we evaluate and choose a product depends on our degree of involvement with the product, the marketing message and or the purchase situation. So in this section, we'll spend a little time talking about each of these types of involvement, and why it's so important for you to understand how involved your consumers are with your products, messages and situations. So let's start with an example to consumers buying the car.

First consumer says I want the one I read about in the latest issue of Car and Driver magazine. It has a six cylinder turbo engine, a double clutch transmission, a 90 stroke bore and 10 to one compression ratio. On the other hand, consumer number two says I want a red one. Clearly, these are two very different kinds of car buyers. So involvement reflects our level of motivation to process information. About a product or service that we believe will help us to solve a problem or reach a goal for that first consumer, clearly giving him or her lots of information about the technical specifications of a car is really going to be important.

While that second consumer is much more of a hedonic consumer, that is, he or she is really looking to buy a car much more on an aesthetic level. So let's think of a person's degree of involvement as a continuum that ranges from absolute lack of interest in a marketing stimulus at one end, to obsession at the other. Starting at the end that is characterized by a lack of interest. Unfortunately, many purchase decisions fall into this category. inertia describes consumption at the low end of involvement, where we make decisions out of habit because we lack motivation to consider alternatives. At the other end of the spectrum, we have cult products called products like apple or for that matter, Hydrox Harley Davidson, Jones soda, chick fillet.

Manolo Blahnik designer shoes, think carry on Sex in the City or the Boston Red Sox command, fierce consumer loyalty, devotion and maybe even worship by consumers. Product involvement describes a consumers level of interest in a particular product. The more closely marketers can tie a brand to the consumer, the higher the involvement level, they will create products are more likely to be highly involving, if the consumer believes there is a lot of perceived risk associated with them. This means that the person believes there may be negative consequences if he or she chooses the wrong option. So it's fair to say that any purchase involves a degree of risk, but obviously, some purchases are much riskier than others. And we can go a step farther and talk about different kinds of risk.

Physical risk describes the possibility that the product can actually harm us That is, if it malfunctions it may injure us in some way. Functional risk is the extent to which we believe that the product won't work as promised. financial risk refers to the idea that we might lose money by making a bad decision. And then we have social risk and psychological risk. Social risk refers to the possibility that the product will create a feeling of disapproval or rejection. By some group that the customer values and psychological risk involves the possibility that the product will damage one's self esteem or will somehow interfere with satisfying some of the needs we discussed earlier on in this module, such as achievement or power.

So how can we minimize these types of risk? One strategy is called mass customization. And this describes the personalization of products and services for individual consumers at a mass production price. In other words, we can minimize risk to at least some extent, by tailoring the product as closely as possible to an individual's characteristics or specifications. mass customization has become a very popular technique. In a lot of domains, so we see it for example, on websites where you can customize, let's say your your daily newspaper, so that it shows you only the sections of the paper that you're most interested in seeing.

We see it with computers like Dell, for example, where you can customize all the components and and basically create your own system. In the realm of clothing. Levi Strauss, for example, pioneered the idea of mass customization, by offering blue jeans, where the different components of the pants such as each pants leg are tailored to an individual's measurements. So to be clear, mass customization is different from having something tailor made where every component is made from scratch, but rather it's assembling components from a pre existing set to make sure that they match the customer's needs. Here's an Another example of mass customization, Mars snack food introduced m&ms faces to encourage consumers to bond with its chocolates. In other words, they're taking a simple, fairly commodity product like pieces of chocolate, and now raising the level of product involvement by allowing people to put their own imprint literally on the pieces.

Another way to raise the level of product involvement is to get the consumer to literally become involved in the construction of that product in some way. Researchers call this the IKEA effect. This occurs when self made or at least self assembled products, including furniture, Legos, and even origami enhance the value we attach to them because our own labor is involved. The takeaway here is to turn your Customers into co creators to boost involvement, particularly product involvement. To the extent that the customer participates in the production of a product, they essentially are bonding with that product and will be much more interested in what they produce, then something they've just bought off the shelf. At the extreme of product involvement, we have the phenomenon of brand loyalty.

This occurs when a consumer is highly involved with a specific product and really is the holy grail for marketers. Because if a person exhibits brand loyalty, it will be very difficult to persuade them to leave that product. So brand loyalty is repeat purchasing behavior that reflects a conscious decision to continue buying the same brand. Although We value brand loyalty, it's very hard to come by. And in many categories, it's more common to find some degree of brand switching. Ironically, brand switching often occurs even when our current brand does a very good job of satisfying our needs.

So over and above the functional needs that a product satisfies. Many of us have a need for variety we literally switch for switching sake. When researchers for the British Brewer bass exports studied the American beer market for example, they discovered that many drinkers have a repertoire of two to six favorite brands, rather than one clear favorite. So with variety seeking, we find the desire to choose New alternatives over more familiar ones. And sometimes we can be influenced to switch from our favorite products to ones we like less just For the sake of variety, this can occur even before we become satiated or tired of our favorite brand. research supports the idea that we are willing to trade enjoyment for variety, because the unpredictability itself is rewarding.