Consumer decision making: process, level and style 123
may prove inadequate and an external search
may be necessary. External search may be an
active seeking of information from neighbours
or colleagues, salespersons or other advertise-
ments, newspapers or magazines, Which? or
Consumer Reports.
All of this activity is accompanied by the
mental processing of the advertising message
in the consumer’s short-term and long-term
memory stores. We have seen that much infor-
mation fails to get this far, but even that which
is stored in short-term memory is there only
briefly. If it is not transferred to the long-term
store, where it will be effective in this and
subsequent decisions, it is lost within about a
minute. Three operations may occur in the
consumer’s memory to ensure that information
can be retained and retrieved:
rehearsal – the mental repetition of
information which links it to information
already stored;
encoding – the symbolic representation of
information which permits its long-term
association with other stored information; and
storage – the elaboration of information in
which it is organized into structures from
which it can be retrieved, i.e. returned from
long-term to short-term memory and used in
momentary decision making.
The outputs of information processing are the
beliefs and attitudes that shape decisions and
the intentions that predispose certain actions
such as buying, consuming and saving. Beliefs
are statements about the product or brand that
the consumer assumes to be factual; attitudes
are evaluations of the product or brand; and
intentions are strong motivations to act in
accordance with beliefs and attitudes. Together
they form the cognitive (intellectual), affective
(evaluative) and conative (action-oriented) com-
ponents of the consumer’s decision activity.
A great disappointment for the information
processing approach to consumer decision mak-
ing was the finding that attitudes, intentions and
behaviour often do not correlate well (or at all)
with each other (Foxall, 1997). Measuring atti-
tudes and intentions might not, therefore, be a
useful way of predicting behaviour; nor might
persuasive attempts to change attitudes be the
key to prompting changes in consumers’ actual
brand selections. The work of Fishbein and
Ajzen (1975) has done much to resolve this
problem. Rather than measure general attitudes
towards an object, as previous researchers had
tended to do, these researchers chose very
specific measures of an attitude towards a
behaviour. By ensuring that the attitude meas-
ure corresponded to the measure of behaviour –
in terms of the target object, the action or
behaviour towards it, the time and the context of
the behaviour – they showed that very high
correlations could be achieved.
For instance, previous researchers would
typically ask how consumers evaluated, say,
chocolate bars (a general or ‘global’ attitude
towards this object) and then expect to forecast
accurately whether they would buy a particular
brand of chocolate on their next shopping trip (a
highly specific behavioural criterion). Fishbein
and Ajzen showed that by measuring con-
sumers’ attitudes towards a specific act, say
buying a stated brand of chocolate on their next
supermarket trip, much higher correlations
between the evaluation and the act were forth-
coming (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). The attitude
measure used was the sum of a respondent’s
beliefs about the consequences of the act in
question, weighted by their evaluations of those
consequences.
By taking another measure – of the con-
sumer’s subjective norm – Fishbein and Ajzen
were able to take into consideration many of the
factors other than attitude that determine a
consumer’s intention to perform a specific
behaviour. The subjective norm consists of the
respondent’s beliefs about the evaluations
another person (whom they hold in high regard)
would put on the act in question, weighted by
their motivation to comply with the other
person’s evaluations. Attitude and subjective
norm correlate with the consumer’s behavioural
intention, his or her disposition to perform the