The Marketing Book 5th Edition

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Consumer decision making: process, level and style 137


intended to modify their attitudes and behav-
iour. In comparison, innovators can presumably
cope with more discrepant information even if
the source is not well known. They may cope
better with cognitive dissonance and perhaps be
motivated by it to broaden their search for
information. They are more likely than adaptors,
who have strong needs for clarity, to remember
incomplete messages. Innovators’ tolerance of
ambiguity might well make them more suscept-
ible to postmodern advertising.
Since adaptors are more cautious and
analytical in their judgements, more reflective
and tentative in their decision making, they are
open to rational, apparently objective appeals
based on reasoned arguments. This style of
advertising would, however, appear dogmatic
and authoritarian to innovators. The more
impulsive innovator would presumably be
more open to personalized, affective
advertising.
All of these differences are important in
view of the apparently intransigent nature of
cognitive styles. One possibility is that the less-
involved groups might be the targets for social
marketing, the communication of an idea rather
than a specific product or product type:
‘healthy eating’ and ‘healthy living’ in the first
instance; ‘getting more out of your computer’
in the second. But the problem remains of
reaching the more active segments with a
message designed to encourage even more
extensive purchasing or use that both adaptors
and innovators must be reached simultane-
ously. Even where involvement has emerged as
the main explanatory factor in consumer
behaviour, the presence of both adaptors and
innovators within segments defined by rela-
tively high and relatively low levels of involve-
ment makes a multiple marketing mix strategy
inevitable.


Further considerations


In the case of new foods, it is apparent that
simultaneous appeals must be made to innova-
tors and highly-involved adaptors. Where the


new item is part of a coherent product field
such as ‘healthy’ foods, it may be easier to
present it as consistent with the needs and prior
behaviour of the involved adaptor (who has
already experienced a ‘paradigm shift’ in
embracing healthy eating). The new brand or
product can be conceptually positioned by
advertising as being close to similar existing
means of achieving a healthier lifestyle; its
physical positioning in supermarkets can
emphasize its continuity with the array of foods
the consumer is already enjoying, its incre-
mental contribution to their healthier eating
practices. It is this adaptive segment that is
likely to form the core of brand/product loyal
customers who will ensure its communication
to other buyers who form the bulk of the
market and its eventual complete diffusion.
They are therefore to be considered a key
primary market.
The innovator segment is far more likely to
respond to the more radical presentation of
such products as discontinuously new. How-
ever, if they were conceptually positioned in
this way by advertising, the effect would be to
alienate the potentially more important adap-
tive segment. Perhaps the answer is to use mass
advertising as suggested above for the adaptors
while restricting appeals to innovators to in-
store promotions. The innovators, who are
more likely to buy and try on impulse, might
acquire some brand awareness from the mass
advertising but would receive their greatest
motivation to buy from in-store sources of
information.
In the case of applications software, the
major marketing (as opposed to social market-
ing) appeals would be to the involved users,
both adaptors and innovators. The innovator is
more likely to try applications software that is
easily available along with other goods, which
can be bought on impulse, tried and adopted/
rejected with minimal cost in terms of incon-
venience, though not necessarily financial cost.
The product mix aimed at the innovator
segment might therefore concentrate on the
dissemination of combined software. The
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