Financing and Marketing Management

Unit 14 - Marketing Environment-Consumer Behaviour

14.11. Beliefs and Attitudes
Through acting and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes. These in turn influence their buying behaviour.
A belief is a descriptive thought that a person holds about something. Margaret may believe that an IBM personal computer has a larger memory, stands up well under rugged usage and costs $2000. These beliefs may be based on knowledge, opinion or faith. They may or may not carry an emotional charge. For example Margaret’s belief that an IBM personal computer is heavier than an APPLE might not matter to her decision.
An attitude describes a person’s enduring favorable or unfavorable cognitive evaluations, emotional feelings, and action tendencies toward some object or idea. People have attitudes toward almost everything: religion, politics, clothes, music, food and so on. Attitudes put them into a frame of mind of liking or disliking an object, moving toward or away from it. Thus Margaret may hold such attitudes as “Computers are an essential tool for professional workers,” “buy the best,” and “IBM makes the best computers in the world” and the IBM computer is therefore salient to Margaret because it fits well into her preexisting attitudes.