The importance of product's attributes on brand loyalty development.

• Author: Serralvo, Francisco A.
• Position: Report

1. INTRODUCTION

   The evolution of the consumption goods market presents, in most of its categories, a great variety of brands, some more known than others, and it is believed that consumers associate quality of the product with the image of the brand, because of several factors. As a consequence, the consumers tend to prefer only one brand, or, sometimes, a group of brands, adopting a loyalty behavior (Bothe, 1996). It follows that the company needs to know and control such factors, as they are fundamental to guaranteeing the success of the product in the market.

   On the other hand, one factor that characterizes the brand preference by the costumer is the attitude, favorable or unfavorable, relative to the brand. Thus, knowing the consumer's attitude is a factor that can determinate the degree of competitiveness of an organization (Aggarwal, 2004). To know this reality, a research was conducted in the segment of margarine, because this product category is, in essence a commodity, a fact that only increases the complexity of the consumer's decision process.

   From these perspectives, the study has the objective of analyzing consumer loyalty through the attributes of margarine that are considered favorable or unfavorable in the process of brand choice.

2. THE ATTITUDE COMPONENTS

   When the people are questioned on what they think or feel about an object, person, or activity, the answers are an expression of their attitude. That is, they generally like or dislike something (an object, person, or activity), without reasons to that feeling under discussion. To understand "to like or to dislike, without discussing the reasons", the attitudes, according to Allport (Wilkie, 1994, p. 309), are configured as "predisposition learned to answer to an object or ideas, consistently in a favorable or unfavorable way". Furthermore, the attitudes are the result of an "information process evaluation based on consumers' believes" (ESIC, 2002, p. 106). The implications and unfolding of those premises are, certainly, great challenges that marketers face, particularly for the advertising management and product development.

   This attitude has been understood as being a system with three basic and interrelated components: the cognitive, the affective, and the behavioral (conative) components (Gade, 1998). The cognitive component refers to the knowledge and the people's opinion on a certain object. The affective component reflects the feelings (that determine the positive or negative variables of the attitude) or evaluations related with the object. The behavioral component is related to the predisposition to act (Assael, 2003).

   The cognitive component is the beliefs (the information and last experiences) that form the body of the individual's faiths. Those faiths determine the perceptions (good or bad) resulting in individual actions.

   The faiths and perceptions are constantly appraised and its result is stored in the individual's memory, representing its convictions on facts and social phenomenon, that is, in the cognitive component of attitude (Bagozzi et al. 2002).

   The affective component, also well known as the feeling component, links with the emotions related to the object, which is felt as love or hated, like or dislike. The feelings seem to form a nucleus of emotions that frequently are opposed, being in favor or against in a given situation. (Gomide and Dobrianskyj, 1998; Echan, 2000).

   Finally, the behavioral component (conative) has been understood as a probable predisposition for action. If an individual has a favorable attitude relative to certain object, he or she will have a predisposition to act favorably and, the opposite, for a negative attitude. For example, if an individual dislikes milk, it is probable that the individual will not consume it. The tendency to the action is constituted partly by apprehended answers to the previous experience (Santos, 2003).

   In this manner, each component of the attitude supplies the individual an interior message that comprises attitude completely. Each component of the attitude can be simple or complex and have a positive or negative value (Tsang, Shu-Chun, and Liang, 2004). The degree of multiplicity of the attitude components can be placed in a spectrum that begins from indifference, ignorance of the object, and absence of an action, and can have an extremely complex group of knowledge, emotions, and dispositions of behavior, varying from zero to the infinite (Gade, 1998).

   With relation to the importance of attitude components, Silvertein and Stalk Jr. (2001) comment that, in cognitive level, one object can be represented as good or terrible. In the affective level, this object can be loved or hated and the tendency to the action (conative level) can be positive, in the sense of helping, to reward, to support, to recommend and to buy, or then negative, in the sense of refusing, not to buy, to attack, and to destroy.

3. METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

   For the investigative approach, content analysis method is chosen, thus intending to answer the subject defined in the introduction of this article. Bardin (1997) presents the following options of content analysis techniques: categorical, evaluation, enunciation, expression, relationships, and speech. This study applies two of them: the categorical and the evaluation.

   As the name suggests, categorical analysis works for fragmentation operations of the units...