On The Working Mechanism And Advertising Appeal Matching Of Involvement

The concept of involvement is widely taken into consideration in marketingresearch and receives a particularly focused attention in the field of advertisingpsychological studies. It is proved that involvement has influences on almost all kindsof consumer behaviors, such as brands searching, information processing, attitudechanging and intention formation. But there still seems to be a lack of agreement onthe operational definition of the concept of involvement among different researchersunfortunately, which becomes the cause of controversial points of view as the relevantestablished proposals and results are concerned.The existence of the problems faced by the researchers of the recent studies intoinvolvement became the reason of the present study, the purpose of which is to havesystematic look into the functioning mechanism, of involvement and the relationsbetween involvement and its matching with advertising appeal by means of some newkinds of methods such as Eye-tracking technique, Process Dissociation Procedure, brand attitude measurement and purchase intention inquiry. Significant discoverieswere made as the following.1 The subjective factor, referring to the audience attention level, and the objectivefactor, referring to the po, tential benefits of advertising product, became the twoimportant integrant elements of involvement. These two factors co-contributed to theinfluences on the reaction from the audience to advertising and made the reaction ofthe audience changeable in a regular way, which could be described as the following.1.1 With the increase of the audience attention level or the potential benefits of theproducts, not only the audience had a significantly bigger number of fixations, and had noticed and processed significantly more advertising information, but also bettermemory of advertising brands were observed. The suggestion of this result was thatthe two important integrant elements of involvement, the audience attention level andthe potential benefits of the products, influenced the same underlying processes, thatis, the level of activation for units of information, brands, in the memory.1.2 The improvement of both the attention level and the potential benefits of productsco-worked to motivate the audience memory of brands, with the change of attentionlevels mainly influencing the audience explicit memory and that of potential benefitsenhancing the audience implicit memory of the brands. This might mean that althoughthe same internal process, activation, received influences from the two factors, themode of influences from the subjective factor might not be same as the one of theinfluences from the objective one. That is, the audience attention helped improvememory efficiency of the brand without the advertising information being attenuatedwhen the audience made a fixation and the improvement of potential benefits of theproducts might help lower the threshold and resulted in the possibility of betterimplicit memory.1.3 The formation and changing of brand attitude and purchase intention of anaudience might not be totally dependent on the individual's degree of the cognitiveprocessing of the induction information from the outside, because the existingevaluation of particular products might play an important role in the amount ofpersuasion.1.4 The Audience brand attitude or purchase intention to products of lower potentialbenefits is much vulnerable to change as the result of the induction from the outsidemessage.2 Different states of audience involvement needed to be matched with different stylesof advertising appeals so that the advertising might have a more persuasive effect.2.1 The rational advertisement appeal was mainly appropriate for the products of highpotential benefits and only when the audience attention got focused on the products could a better effect of advertisement be achieved. This mode of appeal might not beaffective if the audience was under other states of involvement.2.2 The emotional appeal, which is sampled by celebrity advertising in this study,could be expected to have a stronger advantage, which was proved to be sure of beingeffective for the audience under different states of involvement.2.3 Therefore, such a suggestion for the managers to select a proper advertising appealapproach was provided that the use of a mixed advertising that was integrated withingredients of both emotional and rational appeals would help to achieve the besteffect when the audience attention could be focused on the potential benefits of theproducts and an emotional appeal might be the first choice if the audience was inother states of involvement.3 An integrated involvement model was proposed, which seemed to be morecomprehensive, more flexible, and more powerful to provide theoretical explanationsthan most previous ones for advertising effects.3.1 With both subjective and objective elements of involvement synthesized, the newmodel proposed that the state of the audience involvement was determined by thesystematic combination of the audience attention levels and the products potentialbenefits, by which the advertising propaganda effects might be influenced in end. Thenew model covered the whole course of four phases of advertising propaganda:information selection, information processing, attitude formation and behaviorreaction.3.2 The selection of routes of information processing could be more flexible becauseof the possibility that the central route, the peripheral route and the automatic routewere allowed to work independently of one another according to this new model sincea single one of the three routes could be activated alone, or more than one of themsimultaneously.3.3 Subjective initiative was weighted more heavily in this new model than previousones with the function of attention in the phase of information selection, the flexibility of the activation of different routes in the phase of information processing, and theimportant intermediate role of the audience evaluation of products in the phases ofattitude formation and behavioral reaction being taken into more consideration.4 The techniques, such as eye-tracking technique and PDP, were completely fit for theexamination of the relevant problems of involvement and, more significantly, thepowerful support they provided in discovering the law of the matching between thefunctioning mechanism of involvement and advertisement appeal could not bepossibly achieved with the commonly used methods.The implication of the findings of this research was that both an effective guidecould be available for advertising practices to make involvement play a moresignificant role in the field of marketing and a valuable theoretical source for thegovernment to establish relevant policies and for consumers to protect their rightscould be referred to.