Author
- Rakesh Kumar, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Business Administration, University of Lucknow
- S. K. Kaushal, Assistant Professor, Department of Business Administration, University of Lucknow
Abstract
Study of consumers’ attitude and its implications to actual purchase behaviour has always been an interesting and challenging yet elusive task for academicians and researchers. It becomes very important for researchers as well as marketers to understand consumers’ attitude and purchase intention especially while purchasing high involvement products like electronic durable goods. The purpose of the present study is to identify and explore the main factors that influence and determine consumers’ attitude and subsequent intention to purchase electronic durable goods. A sample of 514 respondents living in urban and semi-urban areas was selected from 8 different cities in Uttar Pradesh using
convenience sampling. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire with seven point Likert scale, which was prepared from previous research studies.
The findings of the study reveal that perceived price, perceived quality, perceived risk and perceived brand image were found to have a significant influence on attitude as well as purchase intention whereas advertisement was found to have no significant influence on either attitude or purchase intention. Further, the relationship of these factors with attitude and purchase intention was also found to be influenced by various demographic variables such as gender, marital status, education, etc.
INTRODUCTION
Attitude has been considered as the key to understanding behaviour. Allport (1954) has described the attitude concept as “the primary building stone in the edifice of social psychology (p. 45)”. The term attitude comes from the Latin words apto (aptitude or fitness) and acto (posture of the body), meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to act’. Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain introduced the term “attitude” during the 1860s
“when they used it to refer to an internal state of preparation for action” in psychology (Cacioppo, Petty & Crites, 1994, p.261). Attitudes are all pervasive; when we say that we like or dislike someone or something, we actually are expressing our attitude towards that person or thing (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2008, p. 256). Katz (1960, p.168) proposed that “an attitude is the predisposition of the individual to evaluate a particular object in a favourable or unfavourable manner”. Hoyer and MacInnis (1997) defined attitude as a “relatively global and enduring evaluation of an object, issue, person, or action”.
Understanding consumers’ attitude has always been of strategic importance for marketers as well as for social psychologists and management researchers as “attitude is considered to be highly correlated with one’s intentions, which in turn is a reasonable predictor
of behaviour” (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). It is clear from the above definitions that attitude is often considered as a relatively stable and enduring predisposition for consumers to behave in a particular way (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Therefore, the study of attitude may be useful to understand and predict consumer behaviour towards a particular product or service (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). When we speak of
formation of an attitude, it means developing some attitude towards an object. Consumers usually purchase those products and brands for which they have a favourable attitude. Favourable attitude towards the brand name is frequently the result of repeated satisfaction with products produced by the same company. So developing a favourable attitude for their product is the key strategy for all companies.
From the marketers’ point of view, it is very important to understand the consumers’ attitude for the success of the brand. Consumers’ attitude towards a particular product or service or advertisement is the result of a variety of information they receive about the product
or service. According to the tri-component model, there are three primary types of information on which attitudes can be based (Breckler, 1984; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Petty et al., 2003; Schiffman and Kanuk, 2008): cognitions or beliefs (e.g., “This car gets 10 miles per gallon”), affect or feelings (e.g., “Owning this car makes me happy”), and actions or behaviour (e.g., “I have always driven this brand of car.”).
