Research On Low Involvement Product Perchance Decision-making Process And Promotion Strategy

People are apt to treat high/low involvement products in different ways. They always focus on high involvement products, while ignoring lower ones. Their contrary attitudes make the promotion of the former one easy, but difficult for the later.Why it’s so hard to promot a low involvement product? Can’t you see all kinds of traditional promotion strategies barely attract customers and all of them seem effectless to low involvement products? Henrry Assael defines people’s perchance behavior for low involvement products as customed perchance for people make their perchance decision mainly basing on past consumption experience. Of course, Factors, like lower price, more available, novel packing, attractive advertising, are effective. Unfortunately, people’s perchance custom and attitudes is so hard to change.Recently, an innovative promotion strategy, which named Cause-related Marketing, make some difference, especially for beverage promotion. In China, thanks to Cause-related Marketing, Nongfu Spring and Wang Laoji Tea make great markting achievement.But this puzzled me, according to Richard E Petty and John T Cacioppo’s conclusion in their research for elaboration likelihood model (ELM). They hold that classic approaches promotion strategies,such as price promotion, fit for high involvement products and contemporary approaches promotion strategies, such as cause-related marketing, fit for low involvement product. So you can’t figure out why price promotion have a bad performance while cause-related marketing succeed as beverage is typical low involvement product.After refer to related literature from past researches, I try to give the answer:cause-related marketing can change customer’s involvement, from low to high, so as to offer augmented product, increase CVP and customer’s perceived brand equity, result in strong perchance behavior intention. But all of this is out of price promotion’s reach. So, cuase-related marketing is more fit for low involvement product than price promotion.To validate my hypothesis, I make my research plan, chose bottled pure water as research object, designed applicable questionnaire (7point likert scale), done random sampling to obtain useful data. Financially I’m ready for data analysis. In data analysis stage, I use SPSS17.0and Amos17.0to process data. Through descriptive statistics, regression analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (path analysis) and correlation analysis, my hypothesis above was fully proved right.According to data analysis result, I came to some conclusions(1) Generally, while perchancing a low involvement product, customers barley respond to promotion strategies.(2) Generally, while perchancing a low involvement product, customer’s decision process is simple. They won’t reckon and compare products carefully.(3) Cause-related marketing can change customer’s involvement, from low to high, so as to offer augmented product, increase CVP and customer’s perceived brand equity, result in strong perchance behavior intention.(4) High involved customers have strong response to price promotion, while low involved customers have strong response to cause-related marketing.(5) it’s better to regard Cuase-related marketing as a product strategy than a promotion strategy, because it meets customer’s need of altruism, increases product’s level and customer’s perceived value, offer augmented product, emotional value and social value. Cuase-related marketing is more likely to change product itself rather than to attract and persuade customer to buy which conditional promotion strategy always attempt to.(6) Cause-related marketing results in positive attitude to brand; positive attitude to brand result in strong perchance behavior intention; price promotion have significant impact on instant (short term) perchance behavior intention; cuase-related marketing have significant impact on long term perchance behavior intention.