As with a lot of things in life, and certainly in marketing, the concept of an attitude is actually a lot more complicated than we usually assume. It turns out that attitudes are a complex mixture of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Let's take a look at a recent advertising campaign to understand these distinctions. Subaru of America found that even though most auto buyers had heard of the brand, very few had strong emotional connections to it. However, current Subaru owners did express strong passion and even love for the brand. Subaru and its agency devised a new campaign that it rolled out in stages.

The heart stage focused on the love that owners show for their cars Commercial shared personal stories of owners attachment to their Subarus. The head stage ads, in contrast, presented the rational side of specific car models as they emphasize how the vehicles benefit their owners in terms of reliability, economy, and other functional attributes. Finally, the wallet ads dealt with the financial details of actually buying a Subaru including special offers from local dealers. So like the Subaru campaign, attitude has three components, effect behavior and cognition. effect describes how a consumer feels about an attitude object. Behavior refers to the actions he or she takes toward the object or in some cases, at least his or her intentions to take action.

And finally, cognition is what he believes to be true about the attitude object. When we put these three components together, we come up with what is commonly called the ABC model of attitudes affect behavior, and cognition. But it's not enough just to acknowledge that an attitude includes all of these components. It still leaves us with a very important question. And that is, which comes first, knowing, feeling or doing. And it turns out that there's been a tremendous amount of work that's been done to answer this question.

And researchers have identified several, what they call hierarchies of effects, that is the order in which these components appear to generate an attitude. So the short answer to which comes first Kind of like the chicken or the egg is, it depends on the situation. Maybe that's not the definitive answer you were hoping for, but that's kind of the best we can do. So let's take a look at separate hierarchies that are operating under different kinds of circumstances. The first of these, and probably the most widely used and discussed is the high involvement hierarchy. And you'll recall that we discussed the concept of involvement in an earlier module when we talked about factors that increase or decrease consumers motivation to engage with a product or a message.

The high involvement hierarchy assumes that a consumer approaches a product decision as a problem solving process. First, she forms beliefs about a product as she accumulates knowledge regarding relevant attributes. Once these beliefs have been assembled, they are evaluated emotionally. That is, how do I feel about these beliefs? How important are they to my purchase decision. And after all this complex stuff goes on and we're going to talk quite a bit more about this in the next module on decision making.

Then we have the final stage, which is do in other words, the person goes out and actually makes the purchase if that's the eventual decision. In contrast, it turns out that many product decisions are characterized more by a low involvement hierarchy. And this assumes that the consumer initially doesn't have a strong preference for one brand over another. Instead, she acts on the basis of limited knowledge and forms and evaluation only after she has bought the product. So here the attitude is more likely to come about through a process of behavioral learning, which hopefully you'll recall from our discussion in module number two on learning. Good or bad experiences reinforce the person's initial choice.

Ironically, while marketers like to assume that consumers usually are displaying a high involvement hierarchy, because that's the way they feel about their brands. It's in fact probably more common to be dealing with a low involvement situation. And finally, we have the experiential hierarchy. This assumes that people act on the basis of their emotional reactions. So first, we display an emotional response to a product that's really cool or I love it or it's beautiful or I hate it. We buy it And then we think more about the experience that we had, and decide whether or not it was positive, resulting in an attitude.

So the experiential hierarchy highlights the idea that intangible product attributes, such as packaged design, advertising, brand names, and even the nature of the setting in which the experience occurs, can help shape our attitudes toward a brand. The takeaway here is that you need to think about what hierarchy characterizes the way your customers form attitudes toward your brand. And in particular, don't assume that they always think first and act later. It's quite possible that you're dealing with a category where emotional responses, for example, are far more important than cognitive ones.