myers&alpert,determinantbuyingattitude,meaningandmeasurement

8/21/2019 Myers&Alpert,DeterminantBuyingAttitude,MeaningandMeasurement

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Determinant Buying Attitudes: Meaning and MeasurementAuthor(s): James H. Myers and Mark I. AlpertSource: Journal of Marketing, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), pp. 13-20Published by: American Marketing AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1249332.

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eterminantuying AttitudesMean ing n d MeasurementJAMES H. MYERSandMARK 1. ALPERT

Which attitudes are re-lated to purchasing deci-sions? Inthis article the au-thorsarguethat out of manypossibleattitudes onlya fewreally relate to or "deter-mine" buying behavior.These attitudes are definedin this article and methodsof measuringthem are dis-cussed.Journal of Marketing, Vol. 32 (October,1968), pp. 13-20.

A LTHOUGH a great amount of effort is spent in measuringattitudes toward products or services, in many cases little timeis devoted to determining what attitudes mean in terms of decisionmaking and especially buying action. Some researchers do not evenbother to ask respondents which attitudes they consider important,or which attitudes predispose them toward a particular choice inthe marketplace. And even when these questions are asked, answersare often not related to actual buying behavior. Yet this is thereally crucial information in consumer attitudinal research in mostcases.

This paper will discuss determinant attitudes, their meaning andrelevance to marketing strategy, and methods by which they canbe measured. Hopefully, this discussion will encourage marketersof all types to give greater thought to the relevance of attitudesrather than to their measurement only.Meaning of Attitude Determinance

In the wide spectrum of all of the various features of a productor brand, there are some features which predispose consumers toaction (that is, to preference for the product, to actual purchase,to making recommendations to friends, etc.) and others which donot. Attitudes toward features which are most closely related topreference or to actual purchase decisions are said to be determi-nant; the remaining features or attitudes-no matter how favor-able-are not determinant. Marketers obviously need to know whichattitudes or features lead to-or "determine"-buying behavior,for these are the features around which marketing strategy mustbe built. Yet this distinction is often not clearly drawn or properlydeveloped, even in many sophisticated consumer products or serv-ice firms.

The concept herein called attitude "determinance" is essentiallythe same as what Krech and Crutchfield have defined as "impor-tance."1 The present authors have chosen to define a new termbecause "importance" has become diluted by loose usage. It usuallyconnotes no more than a moderate relationship to decision making,while we wish to discuss attitudes which are truly decisive. Hence,we prefer "determinance," a term which can have more specificmeaning than "importance."For every product, brand, pattern, style, or other individual offer-ing to the public, there are at least two "levels" of evaluation byconsumers:

1. Overall attitude toward the item, in terms of its suitability ordesirability. The relationship of overall attitude to subsequent1David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield, Theory and Problems ofSocial Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1948).

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14 Journal of Marketing, October, 1968buying action has been discussed by Palda,2DuBois,3 Howard,4 and others.2. Attitudes toward each of the item's componentfeatures or characteristics. These attitudespresumably combine or summate in some wayto produce an "overall attitude" toward theitem.This paper will consider primarily these latter typesof attitudes; for example, what the important fea-tures or characteristics are and how, they combineto affect both the overall evaluation of an item and

the actual purchasing decision.Strictly speaking, then, this article will discuss"feature determinance," or "attribute determinance,"rather than "attitude determinance," since the vari-ous features and attributes are what combine into

the whole. However, since it is the attitudes towardthe various features that combine into the overallevaluation or attitude, often reference will be madeto determinant attitudes rather than features.With reference to determinant attitudes, NelsonFoote, Manager of the Consumer and Public Rela-tions Research Program for General Electric, com-mented:

In the electrical appliance business, we havebeen impressed over and over by the way in whichcertain characteristics of products come to betaken for granted by consumers, especially thoseconcerned with basic functional performance orwith values like safety. If these values are missingin a product, the user is extremely offended. Butif they are present, the maker or seller gets nospecial credit or preference, because quite logicallyevery other maker and seller is assumed to beoffering equivalent values. In other words, thevalues that are salient in decision-making are thevalues that are problematic-that are important,to be sure but also those which differentiate oneoffering from another.5

To further illustrate this concept, in proprietarystudies asking consumers to evaluate such automo-bile attributes as power, comfort, economy, appear-ance, and safety, consumers often rank safety asfirst in importance. However, these same consumersdo not see various makes of cars as differing widelywith respect to safety; therefore, safety is not adeterminant attitude or feature in the actual pur-2 Kristian S. Palda, "The Hypothesis of a Hierarchy ofEffects: A Partial Evaluation," Journal of MarketingResearch, Vol. 3 (February, 1966), pp. 13-24.3 Cornelius DuBois, "The Story of Brand XL: HowConsumer Attitudes Affected Its Market Position,"Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 24, Proceedings,Fifteenth Annual Conference, American Associationfor Public Opinion Research (Fall, 1960), pp. 479-480.4John A. Howard, Marketing: Executive and BuyerBehavior (Columbia University Press, 1963).5 Nelson N. Foote, "Consumer Behavior: Household

Decision-Making," Vol. 4 (New York UniversityPress, 1961).

chase decision. Without the knowledge that con-sumers see little difference among cars in terms ofsafety, it would be natural for the manufacturer toconclude that safety is an important motivator interms of the purchasing decision and to stress thisin promotion efforts, when the same funds mightbe more effectively used to stress attributes whichactually determine product choice.This is not to say, of course, that a manufacturercan get away with ignoring safety considerations.At any given time, all the various brands may haveabout the same level of perceived possession of anattribute (safety), and thus it will not be as im-portant for the present as some attribute for whichdifferences are the basis for current brand prefer-ences. This should rightly lead the company toconcentrate on raising its performance in featuresother than safety. However, if safety is totallyignored, the brand may soon be perceived as beingso unsafe that its share of the market might slip.This would imply that safety could achieve determi-nance, a quality it would hold until concentrationon safety by the "unsafe" company would bringits product back into line with the others. Thus,determinance is a dynamic concept, and studies re-lating attitudes to buying behavior need to be re-peated often enough to keep informed of these pos-sible shifts.Non-determinant Attitudes

The concept of determinant attitudes can furtherbe illustrated by showing results from a recent study

* ABOUT THE AUTHORS. James H.Myers is DeBell Professorof BusinessAd-ministrationat the University of SouthernCalifornia, where he received his Ph.D. |in Psychology. Prior to that he was Di-rector of Researchfor the Western HomeOffice of the Prudential Insurance Com-pany, Los Angeles.Dr. Myers also serves as consultant toHaug Associates in Los Angeles. He iscoauthor of CONSUMER BEHAVIOR ndMARKETINGMANAGEMENT and author of the forthcomingbook THE MANAGEMENT OF MARKETINGRESEARCH. Hehas written'widely for various marketing and statistical journals.

Mark I. Alpert is Assistant Professorof Marketing at the Graduate School ofBusiness, The University of Texas atAustin. He received his B.S. in IndustrialManagement from the Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology, and an M.B.A. inMarketing and an M.S. in QuantitativeBusiness Analysis from the University ofSouthern California. He is currently com-pleting a D.B.A. dissertation in Market-ing, also at the University of SouthernCalifornia.Mr. Alpert was a member of the Pilot Doctoral Consortiumof the American Marketing Association, in 1966, and for thepast year has been Assistant Professor of Marketing at theCalifornia State College at Long Beach.

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Determinant Buying Attitudes: Meaning and Measurement 15TABLE1

PERCENTAGEOF PASSENGERSRATING "EXCELLENT"Airline Airline AirlineFeature #1 #2 #3

Overall Service 43% 46% 49%Baggage Check-In 42 53 48Ticket Counter 44 49 46Boarding Gate 45 57 47Liquor, 1st Class 61 62 52Liquor, Coach 39 41 37Hostess, 1st Class 74 71 66Hostess, Coach 61 62 55Food, 1st Class 61 59 52Food, Coach 42 45 36

wherein these attitudes did not emerge. This studywas undertaken by an airline to measure its imageand that of its competitors among the flying public.Passengers on each of three airlines were askedto rate that airline (the one they were traveling on)on various factors or features thought to be impor-tant, and then to give an overall evaluation of thatairline. Results are shown in Table 1.

What is being sought is one or more of the ratedfeatures or services that relate to the evaluation ofoverall service. That is, the airline rated highest onoverall service should also be rated highest on atleast one of the service features covered in the sur-vey. Conversely, the lowest rated airline should alsobe rated lowest on this same feature. Such a featurewould thus be related to the overall evaluation andwould likely be a "determinant" attitude in termsof choice of airline. It is interesting to note fromTable 1 that the airline receiving the highest over-all evaluation (Airline #3) was not rated higheston any of the various components or features. Asa matter of fact, it was rated lowest on six of thenine features Apparently none of the featurescovered in this survey is related to, or "determines,"the choice among airlines. What does determinechoice, then? We apparently do not know, at leastfrom the results of this survey.The reader may protest that the criterion (overallevaluation) is attitudinal, and not behavioral. Whatpeople say may not be what they do, when it comesto actual choice among competing airlines. Yet theairline receiving the highest overall evaluation (Air-line #3) was also the one showing the greatestincrease in share of market in preceding months.Even then, however, one must be cautious in in-ferring causality from relationships, as in any non-experimental study. It might be, for example, thatAirline #3 also increased its schedules the mostduring this period of time. However, when bothattitudinal and behavioral criteria point in the samedirection, marketers can feel more confident indrawing conclusions about determinant attitudes.

Identifying Determinant AttitudesIn order to identify which attitudes are determi-nant and to discern their relative degree of determi-

nance, it is necessary to go beyond the mere scalingof respondents' attitudes. The study design mustalso include a methodology for measuring determi-nance, for this will not just naturally develop inthe course of scaling.There are three major approaches to identifyingdeterminant attitudes:

1. Direct questioning2. Indirect questioning, including motivationresearch and covariate analysis3. Observation and experiment

At the present time, it is apparently not knownwhich of these three is most effective for any givenproblem or application. (A definitive study com-paring these approaches under carefully controlledconditions is under way as part of a doctoral dis-sertation by the second author of this paper.) Thepurpose of this article is not to answer the questionof the comparative effectiveness of the three ap-proaches, but rather to present illustrations of eachso that the techniques will be clear and can be usedby future investigators.Direct Questioning

The most obvious way to approach determinantattitudes is, of course, to ask consumers directlywhat factors they consider important in a purchasingdecision. Thus, the respondent is asked to statehis reasons for preferring one product or brandto another, or possibly to explain why he buys oneitem and not another. Or, he may be asked to ratehis "ideal brand" for a given product in terms ofseveral product attributes, so that an ideal profilemay be constructed. In any event, direct ques-tioning approaches put the respondent "on the spot"concerning his own motivations, as opposed to suchindirect questioning methods as "motivation re-search," which infer a person's motives from whathe says in response to indirect questioning or toprojective stimuli.For many years, direct questioning involved ask-ing respondents to tell why they bought or did notbuy a given product as a means of uncovering de-terminant attitudes. Variations of this traditionalapproach called for asking the respondent to namethe attributes he looks for in his choice of a givenproduct. The researcher tabulated responses accord-ing to attribute categories and presumed that fre-quency of naming an attribute indicated its relativeimportance in the buying decision.This approach has the appeal of seeming to getdirectly to the issue of "Why do you buy?" How-ever, it has unfortunately rested upon two very ques-tionable assumptions, namely: (1) the respondentknows why he buys or prefers one product to an-other, and (2) the respondent will willingly tell what

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16 Journal of Marketing, October, 1968TABLE 2

IMPORTANCERATINGS OF SAVINGSANDLOAN CHARACTERISTICSTABLE 3

DIFFERENCERATING OF SAVINGSANDLOAN CHARACTERISTICS

Benefit or ClaimSafety of moneyInterest rate earnedGovernment insuranceFinancial strengthEase of withdrawing moneyManagement abilityAttitude of personnelSpeed/efficiency of serviceCompounding frequencyBranch location convenienceTime required to earn interestParking convenienceYears in businessOther servicesBuilding/office attractivenessPremiums offered

AverageRatings*1.41.61.62.02.02.02.12.22.22.32.32.42.53.13.44.0

*(1-"extremely important"2-"very important"3-"fairly important"4-"slightly important," etc.)

these reasons are. The literature of marketing re-search contains refutations of these assumptions; itis not necessary to go into great detail disputingthem here. The plain fact appears to be that con-sumers often do not understand their own reasonsfor purchasing something, and even when they dothey are unwilling to admit what may make themlook foolish or irrational. Consequently many an-swers given to traditional direct questioning ap-proaches have often been faithfully reported, ana-lyzed, and acted upon, only to learn later that theaction taken proved to be irrelevant to the typicalconsumer's purchasing decision."Ideal" Attributes

A direct questioning approach which has beenpopular consists of asking respondents to describethe characteristics of the "ideal" brand or companyin the product or service category being studied. Byalso asking for ratings on a particular brand interms of these characteristics, one hopes to find outwhere "gaps" exist between his own brand imageand the optimal brand image. Unfortunately, thisapproach shares the problems of traditional directquestioning, in that people may have difficulty inconceptualizing the "ideal" brand and also mightbe unwilling to admit to some of the attributes bywhich they really are influenced. An excellent illus-tration of this approach can be found in an articleby Bolger.66John F. Bolger, Jr., "How to Evaluate Your Com-

pany Image," JOURNALOF MARKETING,Vol. 24 (Octo-ber, 1959), pp. 7-10.

Benefit or ClaimYears in businessFinancial strengthParking convenienceSafety of moneyManagement abilityGovernment insuranceBranch locationconvenienceAttitude of personnelInterest rate earnedSpeed/efficiencyof serviceEase of withdrawingmoneyCompounding frequencyTime required to

earn interestBuilding/officeattractivenessOther services offeredPremiums offered

BigDiff.53%403736353534343332292826242115

SmallDiff.31%323515261136283028

NoDiff.10%222247275128333535

Don'tKnow6%6621232525

18 48 536 31 534443436

33302938

7216

11

Dual QuestioningAnother problem common to the above approachesis that there is little attempt by the researcher toaccount for the fact that certain attributes which

might be seen by respondents as being important,are also seen as being possessed in equal degree bythe competing alternative selections. Where thisoccurs, any approach which merely asks "What isimportant in choosing a ...... ?" will overempha-size the role of such attributes as automobile safety,for example (as mentioned earlier in this paper).For even if one elicits honest answers, the questionsmay not be sufficiently meaningful to allow the focusto be narrowed to attributes which truly determineconsumer behavior.

This problem leads to another major direct ques-tioning approach, one which will be called "dualquestioning." This approach involves asking twoquestions concerning each product attribute whichmight be determinant. Consumers are first askeddirectly what factors they consider important in apurchasing decision, and then they are asked howthey perceive these factors as differing among thevarious products or brands. As an illustration ofthis approach, consider Tables 2 and 3 which weredeveloped in the process of a survey among thegeneral public in the Los Angeles area relative toattitudes toward savings and loan associations. (Thevarious benefits or claims are ranked in descendingorder in each table, so that comparisons betweenthe tables can be made more easily.)Notice that some items rank high in rated im-portance but are not thought to differ much amongthe various savings and loan associations (for ex-ample, safety of money, interest rate earned). Thus,

Journal of Marketing, October, 19686



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Determinant Buying Attitudes: Meaning and Measurementwhile safety of money was ranked first in impor-tance, about half of all respondents felt there wasno difference among savings and loan associationsin terms of safety; therefore, safety of funds mightnot be the most determinant attitude even though itwas rated the most important attitude by respon-dents. Conversely, some items show big differencesamong the various associations but are consideredto be of relatively little importance in determiningthe choice of a savings and loan association (forexample, years in business, parking convenience).On the other hand, interest rate shows a veryhigh "importance" ranking and far fewer respon-dents feel there is no difference among the variousassociations relative to interest rate. Also, financialstrength was somewhat lower in rated importance,but was second highest in terms of the differenceamong various associations. Therefore, these two-interest rate and financial strength-might be rela-tively determinant attitudes. In similar fashion, theresearcher can proceed through an analysis of thevarious ratings to identify which attitudes seem toinfluence the choice most among various savings andloan associations and are thus presumably the mostdeterminant.Indirect Questioning

Another approach to identifying determinant at-titudes is through indirect questioning, of whichthere are many forms. We will define "indirect ques-tioning" as any interviewing approach which does notdirectly ask respondents to indicate the reasons whythey bought a product or service, or which featuresor attributes are most important in determiningchoice. The most prominent form of indirect ques-tioning is probably "motivation research," but it isby no means the only way indirect questioning canbe done or used.

Motivation ResearchIn spite of the claims of motivation researchersthat they are always uncovering the "real" reasonsfor buying, few carefully controlled studies can becited in support of this position. One comparativestudy was done by Gerhard Wiebe,7 contrasting re-

sults from "incomplete sentence" questions with re-sults from direct questions on the same topic, in asurvey for a firm which provides building main-tenance services for large office buildings. The in-complete sentence approach produced, in this case atleast, not only more information but also feelingsof a different tone than were obtained from conven-tional direct questioning. It appears from Wiebe'sresults that dissatisfactions over personnel weremore important than direct questioning would indi-cate. However, it should be noted that no attempt7 Gerhard D. Wiebe, "Sampling-Motivation Research

Merger: How Will It Aid Ad Men?" Printers' Ink(November 28, 1958), p. 23 ff.

was made to relate these responses to any action oreven to expected action on the part of customers.Inference of "Ideal" AttributesAn approach which is more quantified than mostmotivational research techniques, yet less quantified

than the covariate and regression models discussedlater, is that of inferring an "ideal" brand fromresponses which describe people's feelings about anumber of competing brands or companies. Thesemethods are similar to direct questioning; however,the respondent is not asked to expose his preferencesand motives to the extent required in directly ratingthe "ideal" company or brand.Louis Cohen infers the "ideal" image from thevarying degree of association between certain traitsand companies which are ranked at varying levelsof desirability.8 Cohen asks respondents to associatea list of traits with several companies, and also torank the companies on an overall basis. For eachtrait he then compiles a listing of the percentage ofrespondents associating it with their own highestrated company, and the percentage associating itwith their lowest rated company. The ratio of thesetwo percentages is called the "differentiation ratio,"and traits are then ranked in descending order ofthe value of this ratio. The higher the ratio, themore closely a given trait is associated with highoverall rating. Cohen compares this list with a listof traits said to be "most important," according torespondents, and shows that the second list, con-sisting mostly of cliches, does not separate high-ratedcompanies from low ones, whereas there is someevidence presented to show that the first list does.

Crespi,9 approaching the problem in a similarmanner, uses the Stapel scale (a modified semanticdifferential scale) to compare image scores for salesleaders and sales trailers, in terms of various at-tributes such as "modern looking," "neat," and"masculine." The major theoretical difference be-tween this approach and Cohen's is that Cohen'sprofile of the number one company is a compositeof several companies, all rated number one by theirrater, while Crespi's sales leader is the single com-pany, not a composite.

Covariate AnalysisAnother way to discover the relative influence ofvarious attitudes toward the purchasing decision isto cast the results of indirect questions into a co-variate model of some sort. This method will providea more systematic means of uncovering relationshipsbetween attitudes and behavior; for example, com-paring attitudes of users and non-users of a product,

8 Louis Cohen, "The Differentiation Ratio in CorporateImage Research," Journal of Advertising Research,Vol. 7 (September, 1967), pp. 32-36.9 Irving Crespi, "Use of a Scaling Technique in Sur-veys," JOURNAL OF MARKETING, Vol. 25 (January,1961), pp. 69-72.

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18 Journal of Marketing, October, 1968high overall evaluations versus low overall evalua-tions, etc. Several illustrations of this approach arepresented below.One simplified but effective covariate approach isused by General Motors in determining which atti-tudes (features) should be stressed in advertise-ments. By comparing people who say they wouldconsider buying a "Watusi" car with people who saythey would not consider buying a Watusi, Smithfound the two groups were very comparableon mostautomobile features (for example, styling, gas mile-age, interior), but that there was a wide differencebetween those groups in terms of their perception ofthe trade-in value of the Watusi. This then wouldseem to be the "most determinant" of the featurescovered by the Smith survey.10Another approach is to use formal correlationanalysis, to develop relationships between componentattitudes and overall evaluations and/or buying be-havior. Seymour Banks used this approach in thestudy of coffee and scouring powder brands. Usinglinear discriminate analysis (which determines therelative importance of attitudes which can be usedto divide users from non-users of a given brand),Banks found that only three of the six rated attri-butes of scouring powder were related to later pur-chase: cleansing ability, price, and harshness onhands. For coffee, only flavor and price were im-portant factors. Attitudes toward other productfeatures were not found to be related either to actualpurchase or to overall product preference."1Another covariate model is illustrated by a regres-sion analysis by the authors, which was designed toidentify determinant attitudes for a cocktail dipmix. The mix was placed in 200 homes in the LosAngeles area that were members of the TRENDSETTERSPANEL of Haug Associates, Inc., Los Angeles. Home-makers were asked to prepare the dip according toinstructions and to serve it to their families and/orfriends. There was no identifying name on thecocktail dip mix. After serving the mix, housewiveswere asked to rate it on the following seven aspects:

Overall opinionColorOverall appearanceTasteStrength of flavorSpicinessAttitude toward buyingEach aspect except strength of flavor and spicinesswas rated on a seven-point scale, from "Liked verymuch" to "Disliked very much." Strength of flavorand spiciness were rated on a five-point scale from"Much too strong (spicy)" to "Much too weak

10Gail Smith, "How GM MeasuresAd Effectiveness,"Printers' Ink (May 14, 1965), pp. 19-29.11Seymour Banks, "The RelationshipBetween Prefer-ence and Purchase of Brands,"JOURNAL OF MARKET-ING,Vol. 15 (October,1950), pp. 145-157.

(bland)." Ratings on the seven aspects were inter-correlated, this time using a "stepwise multiple re-gression" program written by the Health SciencesComputing Facility, U.C.L.A. "Buying intention"was designated as the dependent variable, with theremaining six variables as independent variables.The results indicated that taste, and taste alone,is the determinant attitude or feature about thiscocktail dip mix, at least among housewives in theLos Angeles area. (A similar analysis on a pack-aged gravy mix showed that taste again was mostimportant, but that color was much more importantthan for the dip mix.) Another regression analysis,this time for a cat food, showed that none of theusual features identifiable by humans (for example,color, taste, odor, texture) were determinant fea-tures; rather, how much of the food the cat aterelative to how much food it usually ate at thattime of day was found to be the crucial factor.Of course, it is always possible that some feature(such as color or appearance of the dip mix, forexample) might be totally unacceptable to respon-dents, so that these product characteristics would berated very low and might indeed be cause for re-jection of the product. This points out a majorlimitation of covariate analysis; namely, such analy-sis by itself does not indicate the absolute level ofacceptance of the various product characteristics,and thus cannot be relied on to give the completestory. Therefore, correlation analysis appliesmainly throughout the "sensitive range" of productfeature desirability among the public.It should also be noted that both the cat food anddip mix regression analyses were done on a singlebrand of a product line. They did not involve eitherthe choice among brands or the actual purchase ofa product, and these might seem to be the morecommonand important problems. On the other hand,the single brand evaluation presented in this articleis also a very commonproblem with consumer prod-ucts manufacturers who are in the testing stageof introducing a new product. Thus, both problems(single brand and choice among brands) are veryreal and legitimate problems for an inquiry of thistype, and methodology is basically the same for both

situations.The above covariate models have in common therelating of product or service component ratingswith some criterion, be it product purchase, brandpreference, or some overall evaluation of the productor service. Within this framework, many types ofmodels are possible. Of course, all will suffer fromthe weakness of any covariate model in that rela-tionship does not indicate causality. Experimentalmodels are the proper way to determine causality,and these models are discussed in the next section.Observation and Experimentation

One of the oldest techniques for attempting toidentify consumer buying motives is that of direct

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Determinant Buying Attitudes: Meaning and Measurement 19observation of consumers in purchasing situations.A modern example of this method, as well as a clearanalysis of its advantages and disadvantages, maybe found in Wells's and Lo Sciuto's "Direct Observa-tion of Purchasing Behavior."12 The authors dis-cuss a study in which supermarket shoppers wereobserved, and detailed reports were recorded of theirmovements and statements when interacting withcertain products on display in a series of stores.The authors then drew conclusions concerning whodoes the shopping, the influence of children and adultmales on purchasing decisions, the influence of price,and also where brand choices seem to be made andhow much package study is involved. One of the find-ings of this study was that shoppers seemed to berejecting candy packaged one way in favor of candypackaged another way. This finding would suggestthat package design might be one determinant fea-ture, though by no means the only one.

The experimental approach to attribute determi-nance may be viewed as an extension of the obser-vational method, for in this approach an attempt ismade to isolate the role of one or more specificfeatures by holding all others constant, varying thefactor in question, and then measuring the impactupon some operationally defined performance cri-terion, such as buying choice. This approach sharesthe advantages of the observational approach interms of not relying on respondent's answers, andin addition it attempts to isolate specific factors toexplain why behavior occurs as well. However,where many factors must be observed, the experi-mental procedure is often very costly. In addition,many buying decisions take place in environmentswhich cannot be controlled without significantlyaltering the relative role of the buying influenceswhose effects the researcher is attempting to study.However, this approach does have the major advan-tage of uncovering causality, in the sense that oneor more features can be found that really "deter-mine" buying behavior. The same cannot be saidfor the other approaches discussed in this article.A survey article that reports several specific findingsrelative to determinant attitudes is the one byHolloway and White.13

DiscussionEach of the methods presented in this paper(direct questioning, indirect questioning, and ob-servation and experiment) has some limitations, de-pending upon how each is used. In particular, anyof the methods which are not used in a situation

12William D. Wells and Leonard A. Lo Sciuto, "DirectObservation of Purchasing Behavior," Journal ofMarketing Research, Vol. 3 (August, 1966), pp. 227-233.13Robert Holloway and Tod White, "Advancing theExperimental Method in Marketing," Journal of Mar-keting Research, Vol. 1 (February, 1964), pp. 25-29.

involving the actual choice among brands must relyupon what the respondent says, and what she saysmight be quite different from what she actuallydoes in the buying situation. (Of course, some ofthe methods could also include the consideration ofwhat the respondent does or has done.)Perhaps the major problem is that it is possiblefor an investigator to use many of the approachesdiscussed in this paper without discovering theabsolute level of acceptability of the various productor service characteristics being considered. For ex-ample, in the case of the savings and loan illustra-tion, respondents were not asked directly for theirevaluations of each savings and loan association interms of the various attributes being rated, norwere they asked for their evaluations of savingsand loans as a whole on each attribute. Therefore,had the public been generally disenchanted withsavings and loan associations in terms of one or

more features or services, this fact would not haveemerged from the study. (If motivation researchdoes what it claims to do, it would uncover theabsolute levels of acceptability of the various prod-uct attributes, although many times not on a quan-titative basis.)It might often be important for manufacturers topay more attention to determinant attitudes amongproducts in addition to among brands, as everyproduct line is always vulnerable to another whichimproves upon some feature that may not be de-terminant among existing brands but could easilybe determinant among products. Therefore, an in-vestigator interested in identifying attributes whichare determinant for the choice among brands shouldalways ask for the absolute level of attribute ac-ceptance for each of the brands (or for the singlebrand) evaluated. In this way, all brands may rankparticularly low in a certain feature (for example,many of the two-thirds of the U.S. public who havenever been in an airplane might consider all airlinesas being equally unsafe). The researcher should,therefore, also ask for ratings of different productswhich might compete with the original product class.The methodology will remain unchanged, but thegrouping of competitors is changed. There is eventhe possibility that all brands of an existing productmight be rated reasonably high in, for example,"ease of preparation," but some substitute productmight rate even higher in this feature and thuswould attract consumers on the basis of this greaterconvenience. This is a further reason for compari-sons among various alternative products.It should be noted that the "dual questioning"method is something like a shortcut to regressionanalysis, in the sense that respondents are asked to"tell" which attributes are important and differentin their opinion. However, an investigator oftendoes not know whether a given level of difference orimportance is of major consequence without some setof external standards. At least regression analysis

Determinant Buying Attitudes: Meaning and Measurement 19



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20 Journal of Marketing, October, 1968lends statistical significance tests to what directquestioning must do with a basically "eyeball" tech-nique, and, of course, a significant correlation wouldnot emerge unless a feature were both important(related to some criterion) and differentiated (withenough "variation" in ratings to allow "co-varia-tion"), and thus correlation with some criterion.There is always the danger of implying or in-

ferring causality from the results of any of themethods discussed in this article-particularly co-variate analysis. Results from direct or indirectquestioning must be subjected to experimental orother validation for greater assurance that causalrelationships do indeed exist between attitudes iden-tified as "determinant" and the actual choice, deci-sion, or action.

MARKETING MEMOM

Evaluating Retail Salesmen Is Far From Foolproof . . .. . . Retail salesmen cannot, and should not, be held wholly accountable for theresults of all their sales floor behavior. When setting standards of performance andestablishing techniques of evaluation, we must recognize that the salesman does notoperate alone. He works in a multidimensional sales environment in which he andthe potential customer are the important behavioral factors. When the salesman iscompatible with his customer and the store's merchandising and operating policies,his chances of success are much greater than when he is not. However, these rela-tionships must be situationally determined. They are not to be found among thepages of traditional sales managementliterature.

-James C. Cotham III, "The Case ForPersonalSelling, Some Retailing MythsExploded,"Business Horizons, Vol. XI(April, 1968), pp. 75-81, at p. 80.

Change and Our Values . . .As the world and society are seen increasingly as processes in constant changeunder the impact of new technology,value analysis will have to concentrateon process,too: on the process of valuation in the individual and on the process of value forma-tion and value change in the society. The emphasis will have to shift, in other words,from values to valuing. For it is not particular familiar values as such that arevaluable, but the human ability to extract values from experience and to use andcherish them. And that value is not threatenedby technology; it is only challengedby it to remain adequate to human experience by guiding us in the reformulationof our ends to fit our new means and opportunities.

-Emmanuel G. Mesthene, "How Tech-nology Will Shape The Future," Sci-ence, Vol. 161 (July 12, 1968), pp.135-143, at p. 141.

20 Journal of Marketing, October, 1968

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