Essay About Corpus Callosum And Consumer Motivation

Involvement&MotivationEssay Preview: Involvement&MotivationReport this essayInvolvement Theory that Creates Consumer Motivation in Buying DecisionAssignment ObjectiveDiscuss involvement theory and its implication for marketers. For a product of your choice, indicate your marketing strategy to market it to a low involvement consumer and a high involvement consumer.

IntroductionHumans as social beings are never satisfied. According to Abraham Maslow in his theory of hierarchy needs, humans are always trying to increase their level of satisfaction (1987). To fulfill their needs, humans are using the brain to think and then conduct their decisions and actions. These processes are interesting, because there are a lot of factors involved in the process of human decision-making. Here is the role of marketers to fulfill and also create the humans needs.

Advertising is one of the ways to fulfill and create the humans needs. In todays marketing trends, marketers are trying to develop an advertisement that psychologically hit the humans brain sweet spot. This paper will discuss the relations of humans brain, involvement, and motivation in buying decisions.

Human Brain and Its FunctionIt is widely known that humans brain consist of two parts, which are left hemisphere and right hemisphere. Each of these hemispheres has a special function that processes information received by humans (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 240). However, both of these hemispheres are related one to each other by a nerve system called corpus callosum (Flemming, 1981, p. 24). A study by Flemming Hansen (1981) shows that if corpus callosum does not work as it should, humans brain will be not perfectly able to process information received by the eyes. Hansens examination on normal humans brain found that corpus callosum has an important role in combining information between both brains hemispheres. Furthermore, Hansen found that right brain hemisphere dealt with audiovisual and artistic impression, then the left brain hemisphere dealt with controls and symbolic information (27).

Picture taken from Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 8, June 1981As seen from the Figure II.1, the corpus callosum has an important factor that makes both sides of the brain can work together to process the information. However, in certain cases of brain dysfunction such as epileptic, cutting the corpus callosum may help patient to recover from the epileptic problem. The research of curing epileptic and cutting the corpus callosum brings the findings on left and right brain function in understanding information that is received by the patients eyes.

Picture taken from Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 8, June 1981The study about corpus callosum (Figure II.2) conducted by Spery (1973) then cited by Hansen (1981, p. 25) found that the scissors located to the right visual field of the patient (with left visual field masked), will resulted the patient understanding that there is a scissors. Then, if the scissors is presented on the left visual field of the patient (with right visual field masked), it will result in the patient not recognizing the scissors verbally. However, the patient will still recognize that there is a scissors because the respondent can pick up the scissors when told to do so. But, the patient cannot recognize the verbal form of scissors.

The findings on function of each brain hemispheres help marketing researchers to do further research about consumer response in various types of marketing activity. To understand the relation between marketing and brain functioning, in 1987 Banwari Mittal conduct a research about consumer involvement and hemispherical lateralization. Mittal was using EEG (electroencephalography) as a way to measure respondents brain activity. Mittal founds that the respondents brain will response differently based on types of advertising that being tested at that time. These findings on brain mapping and its functions leads to the research about human mind involvement and buying decision.

Involvement TheoryThere are a lot of models that developed by marketing researcher to perfectly measure consumers needs and wants. Before the involvement theory was found, marketing researchers assumed that consumer use a continuous step before finally coming to purchase decisions. The continuous steps include a complex series of mental and behavior that ranged from awareness to evaluation, to behavior, then to final evaluation.

Findings in distinct brain function lead the marketing researchers to realize that there are other factors involved in buying decisions without involving a series complex process of thought seen on Figure III.1; then, the buying decision just related to personal relevancy (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 240). Further research about human buying decisions based on involvement theory discovered that the left side of brain has nature of “rational, active and realistic,” then the right side of brain has nature of “emotional, metaphoric, impulsive, and intuitive” (Schifman and Kanuk, 2007, 240).

Based on these brain natures, early involvement theory created by the marketing researchers divides consumer involvement into two levels that are low involvement and high involvement. According to Mittal (1987, p. 41), Krugman in 1970 was the first marketing researcher that suggested high involvement consumer behavior is related to the left brain proficiency and low involvement of consumer behavior is related to the right brain proficiency.

To determine the level of consumer involvement, marketing researchers use the importance of items related with personal feelings of the consumer. Therefore, high involvement activities that so-called cognitive processes will relate to the items that are very important to the consumer, and need to be carefully assessed before ending in a buying decision; then, low involvement consumer activities will relate to any buying activities that do not have any further consideration because it only has very little relevancy to the consumer (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2007, p. 242). For these reasons, every consumer will have his or her own preferences for determining factors involved in their feelings on buying decisions and then marketing researchers can determine consumers high or low involvement preferences based on their condition. As shown in Figure III.2, Schifman and Kanuk (2007, p.244)

A high involvement lifestyle in the consumer’s life has a large and persistent cost. The value of the consumption of tobacco is higher than the value of individual and family income in most studies. To assess the impact of smoking on a consumer’s satisfaction with a decision on tobacco use, we have used results from all 5 studies to assess changes in the quality of the consumer’s overall psychological and emotional experiences with tobacco. We calculated costs for each factor in a multivariate comparison of individual and family levels of tobacco use between a cohort of 757 men and women with prior tobacco use history who gave information about the tobacco and consumer interaction experiences of a control group. We found no meaningful difference in health outcomes with tobacco use between the two groups (with either an adjusted OR 10- for all costs) between the two groups (i.e., a non-significant effect size was found when an interaction-free study was excluded). The results indicated that in particular, a 1% increase in the quality of cigarettes, compared with no change, was observed after a 2-day intervention during the week leading from the 1st week of age to the first week of age. However, this was followed up at 6 h to a period of 1 year. The increase in quality with cigarette use was not significant in any cohort except those with tobacco use history who were smokers. These findings may indicate that those with high smoking conditions will prefer to be free from tobacco, and that exposure to cigarette use will not result in problems in self‐management, including quitting smoking less than the time limit they have been used or quitting smoking less than the time limit they have not used. The estimated cost of smoking after a 1-day intervention for this cohort is estimated by estimating the cost of an intervention for each 1-month period and the amount in the future of tobacco use. Each increase in quality of cigarettes in the 0.2–6.8 h period after the 1 year intervention was compared with 0.2% of the baseline quality of tobacco use for the baseline 6 h period. The 1 h study has resulted in an estimated 6.8% decrease in quality by the estimated cost of cigarette consumption since 2002. Table IX. Study Outcome Cost Effect Type of smoking (n = 809) 1.95 (1.94–1.99) 2.28 (1.18–2.43) 3.45 (2.35–3.85) 4.18 (4.30–4.70) Open in a separate window It is apparent from the data presented that any reduction in quality of cigarette consumption may have a causal effect on smoking. More research is necessary, but there is potential to distinguish between the quality of cigarette consumption that is associated with individual smokers and the quality that is associated with tobacco use and cigarette use that is strongly associated with other smokers. Table X defines quality of cigarette consumption as the amount of content of tobacco cigarette used. For an adult cohort that would benefit from more detailed information about the quality of tobacco cigarettes, we estimated the cost of smoking that is due to smoking in order to evaluate the benefits from more detailed information about the quality of cigarette usage (i.e., smoking cessation, smoking cessation cessation intervention, smoking control, smoking cessation program, and other measures of health and well‐being across a series of studies). Because these changes in quality have been shown to have relatively small relative effects, estimates of cost of quitting smoking should be extrapolated to all smoking types of smokers. The study costs included in this analysis were the following: (1) the cost/benefit ratio of smoking cessation and smoking control