| Attitudes are viewed as a particularly important intervening variable between a consumer's awareness of a brand and the intention to purchase that brand. Since consumers do not buy brands they do not like, the importance of creating favorable attitudes toward products, brands and companies can hardly be over-emphasized. However, subsequent to the introduction of multi-attribute models in the late 1960s, practically all textbooks and journal articles relied on a componential view of consumer attitudes. These models define attitudes as a weighted assembly of beliefs about the features or benefits of the product.; It is worth noting that practitioners---who are actually responsible for creating favorable attitudes toward their product offerings---appear to believe that consumers often form attitudes in a very different way. Consider the prevalence of social identity oriented advertising themes (e.g., a brand is held up to be the embodiment of a particular "lifestyle" associated with consumers grouped into some type of social category). Moreover, consumers' social identification often becomes the focus of market segmentation and product positioning strategies. Yet, a favorable attitude toward a socially symbolized brand that is created using this approach is not well described via a multi-attribute, feature/benefit-based process.; In some respects, the situation described above might be thought of as a "disconnect" between scholarly research on consumer attitudes and practitioners' frequently selected means of creating favorable attitudes. This research attempts to address this gap. It takes the view that there are multiple bases for attitude formation. Further, it is important to understand the precise conditions under which a particular basis for attitude formation is likely to lead to an attitude.; Social identity is hypothesized to serve as a basis for attitude formation when a social identity is (1) salient, (2) self-important, (3) object relevant, and provides (4) an evaluative basis to respond. Three laboratory experiments examine the theoretical underpinnings of this assertion. Evidence from experiment 1(a) suggests that a social identity's salience can mediate consumers' momentary self-conceptions which when combined with object relevance (experiment 1b) leads to more favorable consumer attitudes (when adopting a social identity would in fact provide a favorable basis to respond to the product). Results from experiment 2 demonstrate the moderating role of self-importance in forming an attitude based on social identification processes and data from experiment 3 suggest that a social identity's evaluative content is more likely to impact attitude formation when it is diagnostic for an evaluative response. The totality of the empirical results, a comparison of the dissertation framework to other frameworks that describe similar phenomena, and the concluding implications of the framework for attitude theory and marketing practice are then discussed. |
