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Consumers develop attitudes about products, brands, and advertisements, and these attitudes influence their buying decisions. What is the role of emotion and reason in developing and forming such attitudes? And what are the implications for positioning brands in different types of product categories? An attitude is an overall disposition towards an object or person.

Subsequently, the attitude-behavior relationship has continuously been examined by researchers. Because consumer behavior does not correspond to a simple stimulus-response theory, marketers are today, more than ever, concerned about finding out how attitudes are formed and maintained. Are they the result of a logical, sequential, and propositional synthesis? Or are they emotional and intuitive? Does the consumer define specific, rational reasons for an attitude, or is this attitude a spontaneous liking for a product, unsupported by any intellectual motion towards this conclusion?

A person’s attitude consists of his salient beliefs. Beliefs are the subjective associations between any two distinguishable concepts (“I believe that Brand X is pure”). Such salient beliefs are activated from memory and considered in a given situation. Attitudes are regarded as multidimensional and arrived at after evaluating several beliefs. Thus, by implication, such attitudes are more relevant for “high involvement” products, where evaluative criteria are more apparent and the degree of information processing on the brand’s attributes is higher.

The traditional hierarchy of effects postulates that consumer attitudes are developed through a sequence of mental stages—cognitive, affective, and conative. Attitude formation on a brand thus starts with beliefs (the cognitive stage) about the brand. This learning process then leads to brand evaluation (the affective stage) or a total attitude towards the brand, which in turn leads to behavior change (the conative stage) in terms of action or, at least, as a tendency to act.

The sequence of steps in the learning hierarchy is not always the same. The cognitive aspect need not necessarily precede the affective, which must precede the conative. Attitude formation could well start with a conative or behavioral change as in impulse purchases that may be preceded by very brief affects or rational cognitions. The consumer forms beliefs (positive or otherwise) about product attributes subsequent to purchase. The affective dimension could as well form the initial stage of attitude formation. An alternative “hierarchy” is suggested with emotion as the initial catalyst in the process.

Positive attitudes towards a product could develop as a result of the association of the product with music that had a positive effect on the listener. Hearing liked or disliked music directly affected product choice. Positive emotions generated by music become associated with the advertised product through classical conditioning. The liking for the ad gets conditioned onto the brand itself and becomes part of the brand. This can take place in the total absence of cognitive beliefs. The same conditioning effect appeared to determine attitudes when nonverbal (visual) information. Individuals were seen to develop perceptions of brands based solely on visual, nonverbal information. This is interpreted as the classical conditioning effect of pairing an unknown brand with a visual stimulus.

New luxury consumers are defined by their highly selective buying behavior. They carefully and deliberately trade up to premium goods in specific categories while paying less or “trading down” in many, or most, others. . . . The criteria for their selective purchases are both rational – involving technical and functional considerations – and emotional. (Silverstein and Fiske)

It would appear, then, that consumers seem to be able to convert visual information into knowledge and beliefs about the attributes of the advertised brands. Thus, the advertisement produces a favorable emotional response in the consumer (“I like Brand X”), which brings about beliefs about the brand (“Brand X is healthy”), leading to a purchase intention (“I intend to buy Brand X”). This “alternative” hierarchy thus validates the use of “image” advertising in which the consumer “feels” the confidence of the product, rather than “reasons” it out. In today’s world, major technological breakthroughs in terms of product attributes are few and more expensive to develop.

Brand differences are difficult to find and promote for gaining a competitive edge. Consumers find it even more difficult to clearly experience these supposed differences. Emotional positioning offers new scope to product differentiation. Brands can now be positioned as “cool” or “fun” or just plain “happy,” as in the case of a perfume by Clinique.

Thus, while product attributes are undoubtedly important for “high involvement” products, emotional communication is imperative for differentiating “low involvement” items and “parity” products, where actual product differences are either nonexistent or difficult to distinguish. It is clear today that even for high involvement products, the awareness stage of the product/brand life cycle need not be dominated by verbal information. Nonverbal, emotional advertising is viable throughout the product life cycle for almost all product categories and attains tremendous impact across all consumer segments due to its inherent ambiguity. We interpret such stimuli according to our personal needs and backgrounds—no one has to decipher the “correct” meaning for us and our interpretation is always true and accurate, so long as the stimulus produces a favorable response. Our “reasons” for liking it cannot be wrong. It is true because it is our own.