The Influence of Values on Consumer Behaviour

The value compass

Erik Kostelijk

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317197072
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: Applied Psychology

Substantial progress has been made in the conceptualization of values within psychology. The importance of values is also acknowledged in marketing, and companies use values to describe the core associations of their brand. Yet despite this, the values concept has received limited attention in marketing theory. The Influence of Values on Consumer Behaviour aims to bridge the gap between the conceptual progress of values in psychology, and the current practice in marketing and branding literature. It proposes the 'Value Compass', a comprehensive value system that is cross-culturally applicable to consumer behaviour and brand choice.

The values concept is used in psychology to identify the motivations underlying behaviour, a concept that marketers have borrowed to define brand values. This has led to conceptual confusion. Whereas in psychology the values system is perceived as an integrated structure, in marketing, values are treated as abstract motivations that give importance to the benefits of consumption. Attention in marketing has shifted away from brand values toward brand personality, a set of human characteristics associated with a brand. Despite its popularity, brand personality has limitations in explaining consumer behaviour, while the potential merits of a brand values concept have remained largely unexplored.

The book presents a meaningful alternative to the brand personality concept and promotes the benefits of using the Value Compass for assessing the effects of brand values and personal values on consumer choice. As such, it will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students in the fields of marketing, consumer psychology, branding, consumer choice behaviour and business studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

We start our exploration of consumer values in the sixth century BC, with Aesop. Aesop was a storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop’s Fables. One of these is ‘The Cock and the Jewel’ (original sixth century BC, translation provided by Townsend, 1867):

A cock, scratching for food for himself and his hens,

found a precious stone and exclaimed:

‘If your owner had found thee, and not I,

he would have taken thee up, and have set thee in thy first estate but I have found thee for no purpose.

I would rather have one barleycorn than all the jewels in the world.’

The cock in this fable is motivated by the practical concern of a full stomach. This concern made him look for food, not for jewels. Values such as prestige or wealth did not seem important to this cock.

Values have been referred to as ‘a conception [. . .] of the desirable’ (Kluckhohn, 1951, p. 395), ‘an enduring belief that a certain mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable’ (Rokeach, 1973, p. 5), or ‘desirable [. . .] goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in the life of a person or other social entity’ (Schwartz, 1994, p. 21). In the Oxford Dictionary of English (2005), values are defined as ‘principles or standards of behavior’. Despite differences in emphasis, these definitions share a common principle: values define what is important to the individual, and guide him or her to make choices. The cock values a full stomach, and behaves accordingly. A young family visits IKEA if they believe IKEA offers the modern yet cosy family life that they desire. A just-married couple might cherish values such as intimacy and romance, values that lead them to look for a candlelit Italian restaurant to enjoy their Saturday evening together.

In his definition, Rokeach pointed out an important distinction: ‘personally or socially’. Within the context of a society or a (sub)culture, values refer to behaviours or beliefs that ought to be preferred to alternative behaviours or beliefs. Personal values, on the other hand, refer to the individual belief that a certain goal in life (e.g., taking care of others) is to be preferred to another goal (e.g., having a successful career). These personal values do not prescribe any cultural or social norm as to which type of behaviour should be preferred to other types of behaviour. They are personal guidelines that help to make personal choices. Throughout this study, the latter viewpoint – values as personal guidelines – is adopted.

Values guide people when they make choices. Consumers, for instance, will be looking for products or services that express those values that are important to them. If there is a signal, a certain ‘flag’, telling consumers which values are implied by the product, it will help them to make choices. Brands can perform this signalling function. The values profiled by the brand (e.g., the Italian restaurant represents romance) motivate the consumer to behave in a certain way (the young couple visits the Italian restaurant) to achieve certain goals (a romantic evening together). A brand with clearly defined values will attract those people who are motivated by these values. The young family shops at IKEA, if they are convinced that IKEA represents a modern yet cosy lifestyle. The brand IKEA then is the ‘flag’: it signals the values represented by the IKEA brand, and tells consumers what they can expect.

Hence, brand values indicate what the brand stands for; they stimulate consumers to have certain associations with the brand. These associations are the essence of the added value of a brand: ‘. . . what distinguishes a brand from its unbranded commodity counterpart and gives it equity is the sum total of consumers’ perceptions and feelings about the product’s attributes and how they perform, about the brand name and what it stands for, and about the company associated with the brand’ (Keller, 2008, p. 5). We can expect brands to express those associations that are looked for by the consumers in their target group. These associations are expressed by the brand’s value proposition: ‘A brand’s value proposition is the set of benefits or values it promises to deliver to consumers to satisfy their needs’ (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013, p. 37). That brands contain an important monetary value can be illustrated by rankings such as the Interbrand Best Global Brands (Interbrand, 2015). This ranking, published annually, depicts the 100 most valuable brands in our world. The most valued brand in this ranking, Apple, contains a brand value of nearly $100 billion (Table 1.1).

Because of the importance of a strong value proposition, many corporations spend a lot of money and effort in associating their brands with certain values. Multinational corporations, for instance, often profile their core value(s) prominently. For instance, the core value of Unilever is ‘vitality’ (Unilever, 2012). Its competitor Proctor & Gamble profiles with the values ‘integrity, leadership, ownership, passion for winning, trust’ (Proctor & Gamble, 2012). Other examples are ‘respect, enjoyment and a passion for quality’ (Heineken International, 2012), ‘simplicity, cost effectiveness and meaningfulness’ (Ikea, 2012), and ‘respect, dignity, care for community and environmental sustainability’ (Starbucks, 2012).

Table 1.1 The world’s most valuable global brands

The relevance of values as a major determinant of brand equity has been acknowledged in marketing literature. The core brand values are considered the ‘abstract associations that characterize the most important aspects or dimensions of a brand’ (Keller, 2008, pp. 45, 151), hence, an important asset for the brand (Kapferer, 2008). In a more popularized overview of the current and future developments in marketing, Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan (2010) signal the emergence of what they call values-driven marketing: in order to capture the hearts and minds of the consumers (or other stakeholders), and to create a meaningful relation with these stakeholders, they emphasized that brands ought to be associated with values.

Marketing theory uses values to describe brands, relying on values classifications developed in the 1970s and 1980s: the Rokeach Value Survey (Rokeach, 1973), the List of Values (Kahle, 1983) and the VALS method (Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles), a method that relates values to lifestyle (Mitchell, 1983). However, these classifications conceptualize values as a list of unrelated items, whereas the current interpretation of the values concept within psychology and sociology emphasizes the interrelations between values in a value system (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004; Maio, 2010; Rohan, 2000; Schwartz, 1992). A value system is a dynamic interrelated structure in which actions in the pursuit of any value have consequences that conflict with some values, but are consistent with others. But the use of a dynamic value system in assessing consumer choice has been limited, so far. A couple of marketing studies used a dynamic value system (e.g., Allen, Gupta & Monnier, 2008; Torelli, Özsomer, Carvalho, Keh & Maehle, 2012; Zhang & Bloemer, 2008, 2011). These studies were based on Schwartz’s value system (1992), a value system that was designed to evaluate the influence of values on life in general. Values, however, were shown to affect behaviour only when they are activated (Verplanken & Holland, 2002). Value activation is context-specific: we can expect that a marketing context such as the choice for a holiday destination or for a new car activates a specific (sub)set of values. Application of a value system in a consumer choice context, therefore, necessitates the use of a values approach specifically geared toward consumer choice, not the replication of a system applied to (human) psychology in a more general sense.

With the introduction of the brand personality concept (Aaker, 1997), the major focus in marketing shifted away from brand values toward brand personality. Aaker introduced the brand personality concept to incorporate the symbolic use of brands in consumer behaviour literature. Brand personality, the set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker, 1997), was based on the Five-Factor Model (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1981), the theory that states that personality traits are organized in five factors. Both brand personality and brand values focus on the associations produced by a brand. However, the brand personality construct has been developed specifically for a branding context, whereas a values construct adapted toward branding does not exist. This has favoured the use of brand personality in marketing literature. Keller (2008, p. 369), for instance, mentions values and brand personality as important determinants of brand image, but in his elaboration of the topic he turns to the brand personality concept, leaving brand values untreated. The distinction between brand values and brand personality is not always clear, judging the following citation in Keller’s introduction on brand imagery, where brand values are explained as brand personality traits: ‘Brands may also take on values. Five dimensions of brand personality (. . .) are sincerity (down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful), excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, and up-to-date), competence (reliable, intelligent, successful), sophistication (upper-class and charming) and ruggedness (outdoorsy and tough)’ (Keller, 2008, p. 66). Due to the popularity of brand personality, the potential merits of a brand values concept have remained largely unexplored. A recent article of Torelli, Özsomer, Carvalho, Keh & Maehle (2012), however, suggested that the use of a values concept for marketing purposes has advantages, compared with the brand personality construct. A couple of recent studies (Kressmann, Sirgy, Herrmann, Huber, Huber & Lee, 2006; Torelli et al., 2012; Zhang & Bloemer, 2008) explored new roads for application of the values concept in a marketing setting. This study intends to progress along these lines.

Summarizing, we can state that, despite the attention and substantial progress in the conceptualization of values within psychology and sociology, despite the acknowledged importance of values in current-day marketing, and despite the widespread use of brand values to describe the core associations of a brand, the elaboration of the values concept has received limited attention in the marketing context. Instead, concept confusion has lead to the use of brand personality, a personality instrument, as indicator for brand values. With this research, we intend to bridge the gap between the progress in the values concept in psychology, and the current practice in marketing and branding literature, which, so far, has not yet fully taken advantage of this progress. The aim is to generate a comprehensive value system activated toward consumer choice:

The development of a value system that can be cross-culturally applied to assess the effect of brand values and personal values on consumer choice.

This purpose implies the following three objectives:

1. Development of a value system activated toward consumer choice.
2. Assessment of the effect of values on consumer choice.
3. Test of the cross-cultural validity of the value system.

The value system that we propose in this study is labelled the Value Compass. The Value Compass is a comprehensive value system applicable to consumer behaviour and brand...