The Many Faces of Involvement

Product involvement:
. The level of a consumer's interest in purchasing a certain product type and how committed they
are to purchasing a given brand. Product involvement by consumers tends to be greater for goods
that have a higher cost and are bought after considerable research and thought such as cars and
computers.

High-Involvement Products and Low-Involvement Products Involvement

Difference:

High-Involvement Products and Low-Involvement Products Involvement!

Consumers buy either products or services. While making such purchases, consumers display

high or low involvement. High-involvement products are those that represents the consumer’s

personality, status an
Features/Characteristics of High-involvement Products:
High price:
Where the products are highly priced consumers display high involvement; for example, buying

a designer product. When buying a Mercedes car, a consumer displays high involvement, but not

when buying a second-hand car.

Technical features:
When a consumer is buying products having complex features then they spends time in

getting themselves familiarized with the product, which shows high involvement. Such

products include computers, refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, music system, cars,

DVDs, and so on. Manufacturers provide product manuals to facilitate easy

understanding of the product.

Major differences between alternatives:

High involvement is caused when the consumer notice major differences between alternatives;

for example, Swiss and Chinese wrist watches. Consumers spend more time to evaluate the

difference to arrive at the right decision.

Projection of self:
Some consumers are very specific about what they buy; for example, if a consumer claims that

he uses only branded products, it means the consumer is ready to pay more for the brand and

convince himself that he is not a run-of-the-mill type buyer. The same behavior is seen while

choosing jeweler, cosmetics, perfumes, cars, clothes, restaurants, and so on. As self-image is

more dominating than the price of the product, the consumer intentionally pays more because he

is ruled by variety and money power.

Evaluation of risks:
Presence of high risks leads to high involvement. A consumer is interested to evaluate risks to

know how to minimize them and if possible to avoid them; for example, hair dyes contain

chemicals. A consumer evaluates if its use can result in health problem, and if so, how to avoid

such risks.

Features/Characteristics of Low-involvement Products:

Brand hopping:
Some consumers do not display brand loyalty. They switch from one brand to another. Whenever

a new consumer product appears in the market, they buy it on trial basis. Brand hopping is

common where differences between the brands are minimum.

Availability of alternative brands:

When a consumer finds similar alternatives within the same product class, they settle for any one

brand. In this case, buying process is not time consuming.

Effect on consumer’s self-image:

This situation generally arises when the consumer is buying daily-consumption items; for

example, if they want to buy Marie biscuits, they may pick up Marie by Parle or by Britannia.

This is because it neither reflects the status nor damages the consumer’s image.

Purchase situation involvement:

Purchase situation involvement may occur while buying the same item in different contexts. For

example, when a consumer wants to impress someone, she/he may buy a different brand that

reflects elegance and taste in a better way than the usual one that she/he buys.

High purchase situation involvement:

A high involvement purchase exists when a consumer has to buy a product or service that is

expensive or that poses the risk of significant emotional consequences if a mistake is made.

When a consumer engages in a complex or involving buying process, his behaviors are typically

different than they are in a less involving situation.

Low purchase situation involvement:

Products, as the name suggests, are products where the consumer does not need to think too

much before purchasing the product. There is not much risk involved in low involvement

purchase, as a result of which decision making is much faster.

Difference between High Involvement and Low Involvement Level in

Purchase is as follows:

Once the customer has zeroed in on the right choice, he purchases the product. The product can

be purchased from retail stores, online, ordered by telephone or purchased directly from the
company. The purchase process itself involves several more decisions it involves decisions about

the place and mode of purchase, payment terms and conditions, delivery of the product,

installment, training for usage of the product, etc. Marketers can study each of these processes to

discover sources of competitive advantage.

Marketers can either conduct these activities themselves, or they may employ intermediaries to

perform these tasks. For instance, the goods may be delivered by the retailer while engineers of

the company may install the products and train the customer.

In case of high involvement products, the purchase process may itself take a long time. It may

stretch from a few days to a few months or longer. The marketer has to take particular care of the

customer during this crucial period in their relationship.

After a customer has bought a product, he faces what is called cognitive dissonance he is not sure

if he has bought the right product. A customer feels uncertain about his choice because in the

process of selecting a brand, he has rejected many other brands. The rejected brands have

features and benefits that he likes, and therefore he keeps pondering if he would have been better

off buying one of the rejected brands. A customer goes through cognitive dissonance because no

single brand is superior to all other brands on all choice criteria, therefore whichever brand a
customer buys, he will always find another which is better than the purchased brand on some

choice criteria.

Cognitive dissonance is higher when the purchase is expensive, and there are many alternatives,

with each one offering benefits and features which the other is not, because the consumer has

made trade-offs. Cognitive dissonance is also high when the purchase is made infrequently, and

when consumers face social and psychological risk, as they do when they buy a house or a car.

A consumer faces social and psychological risks when people whose opinions count in his life
evaluate him on the products he possesses. In such a situation, he looks for evidence that he has

bought the right product—asks people who have bought the same brand and revisits the brand’s

advertisements and brochures.

Companies should make efforts to reduce customers’ cognitive dissonance by continuing to

advertise, and by reassuring them through letters and visits that they have bought the right

product. And the best away to ensure that the customer does not go through cognitive dissonance

is to ensure that the brand gives superior performance on the choice criteria that are important to
customers.
Message-response involvement:

Is a way that consumers can get involved with the marketing aspect of a product. This includes

strategies like using prominent and novel stimuli, celebrity endorsements, providing value,

appealing to needs, and allowing consumers to make messages or advertisements for the product.

Message-response involvement is a way that consumers can get involved with the marketing

aspect of a product. This includes strategies like using prominent and novel stimuli, celebrity

endorsements, providing value, appealing to needs, and allowing consumers to make messages
or advertisements for the product. The use of prominent and novel stimuli can be used within a

commercial, but also in how the product is presented. Marketers have started to use spectacles to

advertise products, for example Johnsonville sponsors the world’s largest grill which travels

around the country making brats and advertising for Johnsonville as well as French’s mustard

who is another sponsor. Axe body spray sponsored a night club in the Hamptons for an entire

season where products could be found in the bathroom and branding was everywhere. Appealing

to needs and values can allow a consumer to feel a connection to the product and make them feel

a part of the commercial which creates a higher level of attention. At the end of our presentation

we showed a commercial about Coca-Cola installing a vending machine in a mall on Valentine’s

Day in which the cost of two cokes was showing that you were in a relationship. This was

something flashy, novel, and unexpected; it created a spectacle that grabbed consumer’s attention

and played on consumer’s need to feel love and belongingness especially on Valentine’s Day. It

was a great, new way for Coca-Cola to advertise itself and associate its product with satisfying

the need for belongingness.

 Measuring involvement

Definition:

Is the act or an instance of involving someone or something: the state, act, or fact of being

involved. How to use involvement in a sentence. The act or an instance of involving someone or

something.

What is Brand Involvement?

When embarking on an employee brand engagement exercise and looking for some advice,
it is hard to beat Benjamin Franklin’s saying of “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I
remember. Involve me and I learn.”

Retail businesses have to be well versed in the need to react and respond to consumer needs
and behaviors in order to deliver an experience that drives value.

A crucial ‘channel’ (not that we would ever advocate calling employees a channel!) that is
often overlooked across the sector, however, are the very people that should be the living
and breathing embodiment of the brand; the shop-floor sales assistants. No matter how
spectacular the display, how broad the range or powerful the brand insight, the quality of the
customer experience rests on the employee’s ability to empathize, assist, differentiate, add
personality all that good stuff.

Happy Employees = Happy Share Price:

This lack of investment in people creates a very real risk of damaging a brand. Indeed when
assessing the power of a brand, as important as its proposition and design are, the ease with
which its employees understand and are able to engage with the brand values must be of
equal importance no?

Ironically, however, investment in brand engagement is often overlooked in exchange for

increasing old school marketing spends. This is in spite of the overwhelming case for
 investment in engagement. Countless studies and articles report time and time again that
aligned and happy employees = happy experience = happy customers = happy share price.

Creating Brand Involvement:

As our name suggests, INVOLVE believe passionately in the power of involvement to get
employees aligned behind what the brand stands for. By involving people in defining how
best to deliver the brand values and create an unrivalled customer experience, they naturally
take greater ownership and commit to it in the long-term. We believe that any well executed
brand engagement program should learn from the Omnichannel approach. Combining live
experiences with the right pre and post event communications delivered with the intention
of involving colleagues in the brand they represent. Ignoring this investment leaves brands
open to damaging their fiercely fought for reputation by a disengaged workforce.

As Franklin put it, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad
one to lose it.”

EGO-INVOLVEMENT:
The perception of a situation in terms of its relation to our purposes and satisfactions. Sharif
and Sharif, who have developed the concept, define it more explicitly as “circumstances in
which attitudes relative to the person himself and his possessions, the people, groups, values
and institutions with which he is involved are engaged” (1956).We do not react to all
situations with the same degree of effort or concern. If our favorite tennis star loses, we are
not likely to take it seriously; if we ourselves are defeated by an inferior player, we are
somewhat more upset; and if we are dismissed from a job or lose the respect of a friend, we
will probably feel extremely disturbed. As these examples indicate, the more deeply our
goals or self-esteem are concerned—that is, the more ego- involved we are—the more
intense our reactions. In this connection Cofer and Appley (1965) point out that situations in
which we are ego-involved have the capacity of bringing about a state of arousal or stress.
In fact, these situations may produce so much discomfort or suffering that we call one or
another defense mechanism into play, such as rationalizing our failures, blaming our
shortcomings on others, or insisting that “it doesn’t really matter. “Ego-involvement is a
broad concept that brings together many aspects of experience. It helps to account for our
inner conflicts, our self-concept, and the feelings of frustration we so often experience. As
Coleman (1964) suggests, the mobilization of our energy and our activity level are largely
determined by ego-involvement: “The individual who is strongly ego involved in becoming
a physician is willing to make more sacrifices and devote more energy and effort to his
studies than the individual who is going into medicine because his parents want him to do
so.” The concept is also put to practical use in the commercial and industrial world. Large
firms use many devices, such as company newspapers, suggestion boxes and films to raise
the level of involvement of their employees. Advertisers often take the public “behind the
scenes” to show how the product is made, the problems involved in manufacturing, and the
concern of the company for the welfare of the customer. Surveys conducted by market
research organizations also keep this end in view. The concept of ego-involvement has led
to many psychological experiments. Most of them are based on “the possibility
of interference with or deprivation of the need to enhance or to maintain
one’s feeling of self-esteem” (Iverson and Reader, 1956). A common technique is to tell a
group of students that the test they are about to take will become a part of their permanent
record, and then to note their reactions when they are told they have done poorly or well.
The information about success or failure may be true or false, and, as Cofer and Appley
point out, much depends on the credulity of the subjects. (Also, the procedure is only likely
to have an effect in a culture like that of middle-class America, where
intellectual achievement is highly rewarded.) One rather consistent finding is that subjects
rated low in anxiety and/or high in need for achievement on separate tests tend to improve
their scores on subsequent tests when they are told they have done poorly, but subjects with
a low need for achievement and a high anxiety level do less well. Alper (1946) has also
shown that ego-involved subjects retain memorized material longer than control groups.
Conversely it has been found that when two memory tasks are presented consecutively and
the subject is told he has done poorly on the second, retention of the first is adversely
affected—an apparent case of retroactive inhibition due to the feeling of failure. Rosenthal
(1944) and Zeller (1950, 1951) have shown that in such cases both hypnosis and later
 success can lead to the recovery of the material. Another general finding is that when failure
is induced, subjects tend to remember completed tasks better than uncompleted tasks
(Rosenzweig, 1943; Glixman, 1949). The more the subject feels threatened by failure, the
more this is true (Erikson, 1954). This is the reverse of the usual finding in such
experiments, probably because our self-esteem is more involved in tasks we have completed
than in tasks that have been interrupted by others. Experiments by Edwards (1942) also
showed that subjects tended to remember more statements about the New Deal that agreed
with their own views than statements that disagreed with their position. Similarly Coffer and
Ape- ply report that many other investigators “have found that recall is superior for material
that agreed with the subject’s attitudes, values or beliefs, for materials favorable to his sex or
color, for materials produced by the subject, such as associations, and for story titles labeled
normal rather than abnormal.” However, they also point out that in practically all
experiments on ego-involvement there are large individual differences in response.

Importance of purchasing
Importance of purchasing. Purchasing is a fundamental function in an industrial establishment.
An industrial enterprise is primarily meant for converting raw materials into finished products.
The wheels of industry will not move unless materials of the right type are bought in right
quantities and made available at right time.

Purchasing is a fundamental function in an industrial establishment. An industrial enterprise is

primarily meant for converting raw materials into finished products. The wheels of industry will
not move unless materials of the right type are bought in right quantities and made available at
right time. Needless it is to say that is buying function which is responsible for supply of
materials to the factory.

As is well known, more than 50% of the total cost is contributed by a single element called
materials. It is proved that a one percent saving in material cost is equivalent to nearly 10 percent
increase in turnover. Saving in the cost of materials is achieved mainly through efficient buying.

An average manufacturer spends a major portion of his earnings on purchases and has the largest
portion of working capital tied up in inventories. The annual reports of companies prominently
illustrate the way their earnings are distributed. High financial stakes are involved in buying and
the purchasing manager is the custodian of his purse; his first and foremost obligation is integrity
in spending its funds.

Added to the spending of major portion of earnings on raw materials is the tendency to buy an
increasing proportion of requirements. Only in primitive economies, are products almost self-
sufficient and in our economy, only the old fashioned of inefficient manufacturer continues to
make everything himself, like a do-it your self-home handyman.

The early manufacturer employed an army of workmen toiling way by hand to transform raw
materials into finished products. The advanced manufacturer nowadays uses costly automatic
machines in the manufacturing process, buying out whole sub-assemblies and components as
well as materials from specialist suppliers; manufacturers in advanced economies are inter-
dependent rather than self-sufficient.

Purchasing can effectively contribute in import substitution and thus enable the saving of foreign
exchange. Purchasing executives by the intrinsic nature of their job gain a good knowledge of a
wide range of external industrial activities. Hence, more than anybody else in the organization,
they are able to bring information about new products, materials and processes. This enables
them to- suggest alternatives which can reduce costs or dependence on imports.

The purchasing is the main factor in timely execution of industrial projects. It is the known fact
that mismanagement of purchasing function is a frequent cause of delays in executing industrial
projects. At times this has led to costly stoppages, interruptions, delays and wastage in important
projects. The economic, social, developmental and political consequences in these cases have
been serious and a source of great embarrassment.

Purchasing is the key stone of materials management. Most companies have developed materials
management around purchasing, often relegating the other functions to second class status. The
materials management organizations that exist in real life organizations evolved out of
purchasing departments in most cases and they are most likely to be headed by an ex-purchasing
manager than anyone else.