A Comparative Analysis Of Product Involvement Of Consumer With Different Lifestyles

The concept of involvement has attracted wide attention in field of marketing, especially in field of advertising and consumer behavior in the past several decades, because involvement can reflect consumer's degree of attention to things and interest in things and it can be regarded as one of the important criteria to differentiate consumers'purchase decision. Several years of study proves that the degree of involvement influences consumer's motivation, whether consumer will collect information on his own initiative and how to think about purchase decision and it explicates the state of consumers'cognition of things. This concept has been widely applied into fields of product marketing strategy, making advertising strategy and so on. Therefore, it is fairly important for a decision maker to know the products'target market and degree of involvement of consumer products for making marketing or advertising strategies. The view that different consumers are different in product involvement even for the same product has been widely approved in field of theoretical study of marketing. Many scholars points out that involvement is influenced by previous living or consumption experience, personal needs, personal interests, social culture and so on. While, scholars who study lifestyle point out that consumers'individual concepts and lifestyles demonstrate the difference of their needs and interests. To synthesize above views of scholars, lifestyle demonstrates the discrepancy between consumers'needs and interests and this discrepancy causes different of product involvement for consumers. Therefore, the author thinks that lifestyle influences consumers'product involvement. It is significant to review the discrepancy of involvement of groups with different lifestyles in specific products for marketing managers to make effective subdivision of target market and adopt pertinent marketing portfolio strategy. Based on above motive, this paper measures college student consumers'involvement in drinks, mobile phone, sports shoes and shampoo on basis of involvement profile theory of Laurent and Kapferer (1985) and reviews these consumers'lifestyles in order to review whether there is discrepancy in product involvement of consumers with different lifestyles. The author hopes to find keys to following two questions through the study of this paper: I. Whether there is discrepancy in involvement in specific products for consumers with different lifestyles? II. Whether there is significant discrepancy in different dimensions of involvement in specific products for consumers with different lifestyles? There are five parts in this paper. The first chapter is introduction, explicating the motive, purpose and structure of this paper. The second chapter reviews and discusses relevant study. In this part, the author first reviews previous study concerning involvement and arranges and discusses previous definition, classification and measuring methods of involvement by scholars. It emphasizes comparison between Zaichkowsky's PII Scale and Laurent and Kapferer's CIP Scale and points out that CIP Scale is dimensionaland easy to observe for different kinds of products, compared with PII Scale. Second, the author reviews previous study on consumers'lifestyles by scholars. This paper not only probes into AIO Scale and VALS Scale designed by western researchers, but also discusses lifestyle Scale (such as Wu Yin's CHINA-vals Scale and Lian-Di Bei's orient E-ICP Scale), which is designed by domestic scholars and suitable for Chinese culture, values, economic development and social structure. Furthermore, the author reviews previous study on relationship between lifestyle and involvement by scholars. This paper points out that most study focus on involvement and lifestyle's influence on consumer decision behavior but there are few documents examining lifestyle's influence on product involvement. Although study of Lai Yixuan (2002) examines discrepancy in product involvement for consumers with different lifestyles, she measures consumer involvement for a single dimension and only compares discrepancy in entire involvement in different products for different groups without examining whether there is discrepancy in different dimensions of product involvement for different groups of consumers. Finally, based on review and discussion of previous relevant documents, the author proposes his train of thoughts for this study, that is, to measure consumers'involvement in different products on basis of involvement profile theory of Laurent and Kapferer (1985), examine consumers'lifestyles and study discrepancy in involvement and different dimensions of involvement for groups with different lifestyles. The third chapter is about research methods. This part explains theframework of this paper, selection of study object and sample method, design of questionnaires, modification and reliability analysis and retrieval of data and at last it briefly introduces processing method of retrieved data information. The fourth chapter studies on data from questionnaires. In this part, it first introduces descriptive statistics of research samples, and describes features of research samples according to every variable datum of population statistic. Second, the author makes use of measured data of lifestyle Scale, draws out eight lifestyle factors through factor analysis, and then divides the entire samples into four different lifestyle groups by Cluster analysis based on discrepancy of every sample in eight lifestyle factor scores and tests the results of cluster groups by Discriminant analysis. Furthermore, according to cluster results and lifestyle factor scores of every group, the author names these four groups as family-oriented, fuzziness-oriented, society-oriented and disadvantage-oriented respectively. Then, the author compares and analyzes product involvement of different groups. First, the author analyzes total level of involvement in every kind of products and discovers that there is significant discrepancy in product involvement for groups of consumers with different lifestyles through one-way ANOVA and Scheffe afterward examination. Second, the author draws out four different dimensions of product involvement by factor analysis (product perceived importance & hedonic value of the product class;perceived importance of negative consequences of a mispurchase ; subjective probability of a...