In consumer research, several qualifiers accompany the term involvement, to define one or more of the particular properties assigned to the concept: direction, persistence and antecedents (Andrews, Durvasula, and Akhter, 1990). Direction refers to the target of involvement (stimulus, e.g. product class versus purchase decision). Persistence refers to the duration of involvement (e.g. stable versus temporary). Also, involvement can stem from relatively stable characteristics of the person or from relatively temporary factors (e.g. ego values, personal needs versus situational and decision factors).
From this perspective, two major types of consumer involvement can been distinguished: product and purchase involvement. Product involvement refers to the relatively stable over time perceived importance of and interest in a product class.
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Stemming from the individual’s values, personal needs and interests. Individuals highly involved with a product class are concerned with it, as they perceive it as important and relevant to themselves. High levels of product involvement are relatively rare. Product involvement has been contrasted with purchase involvement which refers to a temporary interest in a brand selection task stemming from situational factors (e.g. risk associated with a purchase decision, degree of irrevocability of a purchase decision; Laurent and Kapferer, 1985; M. J. Houston and Rothschild, 1978). This distinction between product and purchase involvement can accommodate several other distinctions that have been proposed in the literature (e.g. enduring and instrumental involvement; Bloch and Richins, 1983; product and brand-decision involvement; Mittal and Lee, 1989; Celsi and Olson, 1988; enduring and situational involvement; M. J. Houston and Rothschild, 1978).
It is apparent that product and purchase involvement resemble the types of involvement employed in social psychological research. Specifically, product involvement resembles value-relevant involvement, in that both types of involvement derive from relatively stable characteristics of the individual (e.g. personal values and interests). Purchase involvement is conceptually related to outcome-relevant involvement; both types of involvement stem from a desire to attain or to avoid an outcome (e.g. to reach an optimal behavioural decision).
Product and purchase involvement can exist as separate entities. For example, a consumer may have a rather permanent interest in a product class without being involved in a purchase decision at that time, or a consumer may temporarily be involved in a decision task without holding a particular interest for that product class (Mittal and Lee, 1989). However, when both types of involvement are present, they
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determine an individual’s overall level of involvement in an additive manner (Richins, Bloch and McQuarrie, 1992).
Further, it is possible that product involvement can influence purchase involvement. For example, consumers with a persistent interest in a product class are likely to become involved in a brand-decision task (in order to make an appropriate brand-selection), because of the importance they attach to this product class, and irrespective of situational factors, such as the risk associated with the specific purchase.
Several conceptualisations, similar to that of content involvement (Chaiken and Stangor, 1987), have been used in the study of consumer behaviour to denote the interest raised at the presentation of an advertising message and the attention and cognitive effort devoted to it. Such conceptualisations are common in the study of advertising effectiveness. The most common of these conceptualisations is advertising message involvement, referring to the levels of involvement evoked at the presentation of an advertising message (Laczniak and Muehling, 1993a; also termed audience involvement; Greenwald and Leavitt, 1984). Advertising message involvement, although conceptually distinct, is closely related to product and purchase involvement, as product and purchase involvement are expected to have a direct impact on it. For example, when an advertisement features a brand from a product class in which the individual has a persistent and/or temporary interest, it is expected that heightened levels o f advertising message involvement will occur, increasing message attention and cognitive elaboration (Laczniak and Muehling, 1993a). Nevertheless, other factors, apart from consumers’ pre-existing levels of product or purchase involvement, can increase or decrease advertising message involvement (e.g. executional features of the advertisement).
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Like social psychologists, consumer researchers have also mostly concentrated on the effects of involvement on persuasion processes. Studies in this area typically employ manipulations of involvement by means of experimental instructions. High levels of involvement are usually induced by informing subjects that they wül select a particular product (from the experimental product category) at the end of the experimental session and/or that the experimental product is available in their local area (e.g. Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983).
However, some concern has been expressed in relation to the external validity of such manipulations. For example, Laczniak and Muehling (1993a) argue that experimental instructions cannot always override innate predispositional factors, i.e. pre-existing product or purchase involvement. Although manipulation checks employed in such studies show that instructions significantly differentiate participants’ levels of attention and cognitive effort, from a practical perspective such differences represent only relatively high and low levels, as opposed to definitive high and low involvement occurring in natural settings (Kamins, Assael and Graham, 1990). In other words, if we view involvement as a continuous variable, the induced differences would not be as extreme as they naturally occur among consumers. Some investigators therefore suggest that it is preferable if subjects are assigned to groups according to their actual involvement with a product class or a brand decision process. In such studies, involvement is assessed, either by one of the inventories provided (e.g. Laurent and Kapferer, 1985; Zaichkowsky, 1985) or by including specific questionnaire items (e.g. Beatty and S. M. Smith, 1987; Richins and Bloch, 1991; Venkatraman, 1989).
The inventories developed to measure consumer involvement also reflect the multiplicity of the construct’s conceptualisations. For example, Laurent and Kapferer
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(1985; see also Kapferer and Laurent, 1993) view consumer involvement as a hypothetical, multidimensional construct that can only be inferred from its antecedents. These investigators introduced a four-faceted profile of consumer involvement consisting of (a) perceived product importance, (b) perceived risk associated with the product’s purchase, (c) symbolic or sign-value, and (d) hedonic or pleasure value (Laurent and Kapferer, 1985). In contrast with Laurent and Kapferer’s approach, Zaichkowsky views involvement as an independent and self-existing situation and not merely as a hypothetical construct. The scale she developed measures product, purchase or advertising involvement (depending on the context) as a single index (Zaichkowsky, 1985).