The Influence of Personality and Attitude on Consumer Behaviour

Structural models of consumer attitudes

In order to understand the relationship between a consumer’s attitude and their behaviour, psychologist constructed a few attitude models to help marketers to understand the consumer’s attitude and behaviour (Shiffman & Kanuk, 2010:249). Some of the attitude models that are considered as important are the following: the single-component attitude model, the tri-component, the multi-attribute attitude model (Rousseau, 2007:195), the theory of trying-to-consume model and the attitude-toward-the-ad models (Shiffman & Kanuk, 2010:255).
According to Rousseau (2007:195) the single-component attitude model is unrealistic and a one-dimensional view of a consumer’s attitude. It has to do with the feelings of the consumer and view their attitudes as an affective learning process. Rousseau (2007:195) also mentioned that the single-component model is easy and straightforward to use and to construct a questionnaire from. The single-component attitude model is also popular to use with commercial marketing research. The single-component model only gives the indication of liking or disliking and not the real beliefs of a consumer’s attitude (Rousseau, 2007:195). The use of this model makes it difficult to determine the consumer’s real opinion towards the product or service, since it only determines whether or not the consumer likes or dislikes the product or service.
The tri-component consists of three components, namely cognition, affect and conation (Rousseau, 2007:195). Rousseau (2007:195) states that cognition, the first component of the tri-component refers to the consumer’s knowledge and their perceptions, while the affect has to do with their emotions and feelings. Shiffman and Kanuk (2010:249) on th...

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