In marketing, attitude is defined as: ”a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Hogg, & Vaughan 2005, p. 150) and it has been observed and that consumer’s beliefs are part of a tricomponent model where: a consumer’s beliefs about, feelings about, and behavioral intentions are inderdependent & combined together influence the consumer’s reaction toward a service, object, brand, store.
Attitudes and beliefs, as I observed in class, do tie in with a previous session on the role of conditioning in marketing(operant and classical) through one of the four functional theories of attitudes: utilitarian function – which talks about reward and punishment.
This is just a piece of the pie, though. They say, ”get in the mind of the consumer”. That means understanding our own behavioral patterns and the attitudes and bias we have toward other people ie color of the skin, certain products like tampons, etc.
1. Brands need to step up their game from the beginning, early on in the thinking process of creating a product or service they have to keep in mind the needs of their target audience, how they act, think and feel through surveys, market research, testing even, offering free samples. That is what the value proposition canvas talks about, so that you won’t end up in the statistic mentioned in the video: ”customers don’t care about 7/10 products introduced to the market”.
One way influencers test their programs or products are through beta testing, announcing that they are looking for beta testers for x program, oftentimes x program costing y amount amount of money or being sent for free to a limited number of people. This can be observed on instagram and facebook. Brands often do giveaways to raise awareness and want to gain followers and orders through such a collaboration.
2. Companies wouldn’t need to worry about consumer’s negative attitudes or bias toward their products if they are transparent and have trust in their product. True for @thehoneypotcomp whose founder and CEO received negative reviews on various sites claiming she is racist and that her products are only for black women to use when it was stated otherwise. She did gain lots of attention and sales were going higher than expected even for a day like Monday.
3. Brand owners and PR, marketing people can challenge, watch and monitor comments and replies on their posts, change how they do advertising – it would have a major impact on the world if the advertising industry wouldn’t promote unrealistic standards. Everyone is beach body ready, isn’t it? Or is it just models? You don’t see many celebrities calling fashion magazines for their impact on women, like Emma Watson did at minute 23:02.
Bias and societal expectations, racism etc can be challenged through examples, stats, facts and kindness. Bias which comes in many different forms and programming starts at a young age. Female kindergardeners won’t see themselves as doctors if they don’t see women being doctors. Doctors don’t come and introduce themselves as ”female docs” or ”male docs”, police officers, engineers etc.
All this because I challenge the theory that says attitudes are learned and cannot be changed. Yes they can, it does require the adult to be responsible and to want to recognize a problem. Attitudes can remain fixed if it goes hand in hand with our beliefs ie single plastic use. We can all go and buy handmade honey soap from Lush instead of that $50 dollar sanitizer plastic bottle. *wink
Thank you for reading, see you next time!
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