Attitudes and intentions have always been a major part of the marketers’ research.

Attitudes, a person’s overall evaluation of a concept, is used in the integration process to see how an object is thought of and viewed. Intentions also determine most voluntary behaviors. Measures of consumers’ intentions may not be perfect indicators of the actual intentions that determine the behavior. Throughout this paper, I will discuss the relationship between attitudes and intentions and the part they both play on the marketing plan.

Attitude has been called “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.” (Fishbein 1-19) And it is one of the most important concepts marketers use to understand consumers. This is because marketers have been able to use attitudes as key tools in the research process. Over the years, researchers have tried a variety of approaches to studying attitudes in an attempt to provide a more complete understanding of behavior. This behavior of consumers has thought to be strategically dependent on the attitudes of the consumers. Although the dominant approach to attitudes has changed over the years, nearly al

Thurstone introduced one of the earliest definitions of attitude in 1931. He viewed attitude as a fairly simple concept – the amount of affect a person has for or against an object. A few years later, Allport proposed a much broader definition: “Attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness to respond, organized through experience, and exerting a directive and/or dynamic influence on behavior.” (Lutz 234-5) Today, most researchers agree that the simple concept of an attitude proposed by Thurstone and Fishbein is the most useful. That is, attitude represents a person’s favorable or unfavorable feelings toward the object in question. For example, if a person’s feelings towards an institution of higher learning are unfavorable, the attitude is generally not too good towards that institution. Beliefs (cognition) and intentions to behave (conation) are seen as related to attitude but are separate cognitive concepts, not part of attitude itself. (Myers-Levy 76-86) So, both cognition and conation are related to attitude but directly.

Evaluations are affective responses at relatively low levels of intensity and arousal, created by both the affective and cognitive systems. The affective system automatically produces affective responses – including emotions, feelings, moods, and evaluations or attitudes – as immediate, direct responses to certain stimuli. These stimuli may or may not affect the response, depending on the environment at which the test is being performed. The cognitive processing model of consumer decision making shows that an overall evaluation is formed when consumers combine knowledge, meaning, or beliefs about the

Some topics in this essay:
Thurstone Fishbein, Consumer Attitudes, attitudes intentions, overall evaluation, purchase behaviors, overall evaluation concept, theory reasoned action, consumers’ purchase behaviors, beliefs attitudes intentions, person’s overall evaluation, simple concept, related attitude, intentions measured, beliefs attitudes, purchase behavior, consumers’ intentions, predicting consumers’,