| Low or high motivation related to personal relevance has been an important indicator of the likelihood that receivers will engage in elaboration or thinking about the information contained in a persuasive effort (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). However, the concept of systematic, in-depth cognitive analysis and or heuristic, superficial processing of information, have not previously been applied to moviegoers. In this study, ten hypotheses were tested and the data provided additional validation to involvement and "market maven" measures (Feick and Price 1987) with the frequency of movie attendance and with the Heuristic-Systematic Model (Todorov, Chaiken et al. 2002) for total thoughts and heuristic thought processing. The significance of this research is that it incorporates involvement, heuristic and systematic processing, and motivation constructs into theories of moviegoing behavior.; The study administered an intercept survey to moviegoers (N=373) at a Midwest cinema and applied the Heuristic-Systematic Model to the entire decision process to see a film at the theatre, considering all of the information a consumer used before a decision was made. The study found both involvement (Zaichkowsky's 1987) and "market maven" measures (Feick and Price 1987) to be correlated with frequency of movie attendance. The findings also supported the role of involvement with the combined number of systematic and heuristic thoughts and the number of heuristic thoughts. Contrary to expectations, there was no support for the role of involvement with the number of systematic thoughts or with the familiarity of a film, and with different levels or types of processing related to the genre of the film. Explanations and implications for these findings are discussed and the study concludes with suggestions for future research. |
