Terms of Involvement: Know These to Know Your Customer
A marketing communications professional will be better equipped to develop coherent and appropriate messages if s/he possesses a deeper understanding of the extent, type, and level of involvement among his/her target groups. Understanding the involvement of one’s target group naturally flows from the foundation marketing principle of knowing one’s customers and meeting their needs.
This post will briefly define involvement and its types; broadly discuss the implications for high- and low-involvement product categories; identify a means of measuring involvement; and discuss the importance of understanding involvement in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Involvement Defined
Involvement is more than an academic concept. The “mainstream” web-based BusinessDictionary.com, for example, defines the “level of involvement” as the intensity of interest that a buyer shows for a certain product in a particular purchase decision. Involvement has been embraced by marketing practitioners and is increasingly of concern to boards of directors.
Johnson & Eagly (1989; as cited in Cho et al, 2005) define three types of involvement:-
- Values-relevant involvement, which is related to belief systems. “I like that brand or I want that product because it has a small carbon footprint and it is made in my country.”
- Outcomes-relevant involvement, which is related to consequences. “I like that brand or want that product because it is economical and it supports local jobs and the economy.”
- Impressions-relevant involvement, which is related to one’s concern about others’ perceptions. “I like that brand or want that product because I want my peers to see me as environmentally-conscious and as a patriot.”
The Highs and Lows of Involvement
It matters what type of business a marketing communications practitioner represents when considering how to raise a target audience’s level of involvement. Marketing communicators should indeed endeavor to raise their target market’s involvement at every cost-effective opportunity if it will help to reinforce positive prejudices and create vocal advocates. Car brands, fashion labels, and tourism destinations are examples of high involvement product categories. Appropriate messaging across a range of media helps each brand maintain their reputations and market share.
For other product categories, such as office stationery and household cleaning agents, there is limited involvement (for the author, at least) except perhaps at the point of making a purchase decision, where a complex mix of involvement types may momentarily rise to the surface to influence the decision.
Involvement at point of sale is critical for both high- and low-involvement categories. For a pencil sharpener, for example, involvement at point of sale might be related to such things as price and build quality (outcomes-relevant), color and packaging (values- and impressions-relevant), and, to a lesser extent, brand salience and corporate reputation (values- and impressions-relevant).
Measuring Involvement
If the marketing communications profession agrees that involvement is important, then it would be useful to measure and benchmark it. Cho et al (2005) describes a means of testing the type and level of involvement. Their research involved asking survey respondents to indicate their level of agreement on each of a series of statements, such as “I try to keep myself informed about toothpaste brands”, and “I’m not always the person I appear to be”.
In theory, a marketing communicator may be able to adopt and refine this survey method to nail down the levels of values-, outcome-, and impressions-relevant involvement specific to his/her target audience, product, and brand. One might take that even further to see if there are any significant differences between target groups, sub-segments, products, and brands.
Issues as an Opportunity
Whether they like it or not, companies are increasingly expected to satisfy people who are highly involved with issues that are not at all, or indirectly, related to the companies’ products. Consumers form opinions of organizations’ levels of “responsibility”. And these opinions are becoming more important. According to Ipsos MORI research (cited in Okunniwa, 2007), 80% of people believe that large companies have a moral responsibility to society, and in the four years to 2007 the proportion of consumers who think that CSR is very important nearly doubled to 44%. This is an opportunity for marketing communicators.
Positioning a brand alongside an issue is more effective when the target market is already involved with it. Should communicators raise a target public’s involvement in an issue in which there is no pre-existing involvement? Clearly the role of governments and not-for-profits is often to raise awareness and involvement in issues deemed in the public interest. If there is a case for commercial organizations to do this, communicators need to understand that externalities[1] have become emotive and complex. It is essential to comprehend the complexities and to consider the implications before pressing ahead with a CSR-linked positioning strategy.
Without understanding issues’ complexity, organizations may unintentionally exaggerate claims and set themselves up for criticism. Organizations that adopt and integrate CSR in their communications must ‘walk the talk’, and record evidence to back up results. Ideally, organizations should ‘walk then talk’ so that communications professionals can confidently spin facts into their strategies, plans, and messages. False or misleading claims about the good created (or bad avoided) by organizations can have devastating impacts on their reputations. (Jevons & Polonsky, 2006).
An effective way to position an organization as being responsible on an issue is to develop active working relationships and communications partnerships with authorities on the issue, such as NGOs. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2008) agrees, suggesting that a successful company will frequently cooperate with a range of stakeholders that might otherwise campaign against it. The partner stakeholder plays the role of consultant to the organization and may even lend its endorsement or approval.
Conclusion
Involvement is critical to modern marketing communications practice, particularly in an era where consumers and NGOs look to organizations to show leadership on social and environmental issues. Studying involvement is a means to achieving a deeper understanding of customers’ values, expectations, and vanities. Thus it offers a solid foundation for the development of successful marketing communications strategies.
Help Me Understand: What Do You Think?
References
BusinessDictionary.com, Level of Involvement, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/level-of-involvement.html, viewed online, May 18, 2010
Cho, Hyunyi; Boster, Franklin J., 2005 ‘Development and Validation of Value-, Outcome-, and Impression-Relevant Involvement Scales’, Communication Research, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 235-264
Economist Intelligence Unit, The (2008), ‘Doing good: Business and the sustainability challenge’, February 2008, downloaded 13 April, 2010, from http://www.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=corporate_sustainability
Jevons, C., Polonsky, M. J., (2006), ‘Understanding issue complexity when building a socially responsible brand’, European Business Review, Volume 18, Issue 5, PP 340 – 349, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Johnson, B. T.,& Eagly, A.H. (1989). ‘Effects of involvement on persuasion: A meta-analysis’, Psychological Bulletin, 106, 290-314
Johnson, P. (2005) ‘Externality’, A Glossary of Political Economy Terms, viewed 11 April, 2010 at http://auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/externality
Okunniwa, T. (2007) ‘The rise and rise of CSR’, Admap Magazine, May 2007, viewed 30 March, 2010, on WARC database
[1] Johnson (2005) defines externalities as the opportunity costs (or by-product benefits) of purchase, production, or other resource-usage decisions that are not directly paid (or enjoyed) by those making the decisions.
