Predicting Behavior by Attitudes

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Predicting Behavior by Attitudes

Attitudes can be very complex, a product or service may be composed of

many attributes or qualities some of which may be more important than

others to certain people. Furthermore, a persons decision to act on

his or her attitude is affected by other factors, such as approval by

family and friends. For this reason, multiattribute models have been

constructed and are extremely popular among marketing research.

Many models have been constructed but the most influential model is

that of Fishbein 1973. The Fishbein multiattribute model argues that

attitudes can predict behaviour. It measures three components of

attitude. Salient beliefs people have about an attitude object,

object-attribute linkages and an evaluation of each. The example of

Sandra's college choice (Solomon, Bamossy and Askegaard) illustrates

this. Sandra considers which attributes are important in forming an

attitude about each college and then assigns a rating regarding how

well each college performs on that attribute e.g. reputation, cost,

party atmosphere etc. then she determines the importance of each

attribute to her. The overall attitude score (A) is obtained by

multiplying her rating of each attribute by the importance rating for

that attribute.

This model has many strategic applications, for example, capitalise on

relative advantage, if Sandra rates a college highly on party

atmosphere but she does not think this attribute is an important one,

the college can emphasise why it would be. Other strategies would be

to strengthen attribute linkages, add a new attribute or influence

competitors' ratings. These strategies have all ...

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...ey felt a citizen of

their own country. This study also focuses on how changes can occur in

the attitudes of different age groups. This programme is useful in

identifying change agents and scenarios about the future which may

more accurately predict actual behaviour than TRA and TPB. (Greenwald

1987).

Although the Theory of Reasoned Action has successfully predicted a

wide range of behaviours including dental hygiene and family planning

and has provided a framework for consumer research, attitudes and

behaviours are only weakly related: people don't always do as they

intend to. There are many limitations, the model lacks heuristic value

and ignores differences in cultural values and attitude trends over

time. Turpin and Slade 1998 concludes that current models are still

rather poor predictors of actual behaviour.

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