Consumer Involvement Profiles: A New and Practical Approach to Consumer Involvement

Today, many advertising recommendations mention the target market's degree of involvement in justifying the chosen strategy. Consumers' involvement in products is believed to moderate considerably their reactions to marketing and advertising stimuli. Therefore it should affect copy, format, media, and repetition decisions. Foote, Cone, & Belding agencies worldwide have even adopted a strategy planning device, the "Grid," based on a highlow involvement dichotomy (Vaughn, 1980). Current practice measures involvement by a single index, or even a single item of product's perceived importance. A new stream of research initiated in Europe since 1981 has shown that the degree of involvement counts actually less than the source of this involvement. Empirical data on 37 product categories and derived from more than 7500 interviews show that involvement is not limited to a single dimension. It should rather be thought of as a profile of the dimensions of interest, perceived risk, pleasure value, and sign value (Kapferer and Laurent, 48 1984, 1985; Laurent and Kapferer. 1985). For advertising managers the involvement profile is an enlightening new tool for understanding the full dynamics of the relationship of consumers to products, for describing targets, and for market segmentation. The purpose of this article is to present the rationale and the main aspects of this new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of consumer involvement. Since its theoretical and methodological bases have already been presented at length elsewhere, we shall stress here the practical applications of the involvement profile.