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Motivation and self-concept

Published on August 26, 2013 Reviewed on March 28, 2019   50 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

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0:00
Hello, my name is Judy Zaichkowsky, and I'm a Professor of Marketing at Simon Fraser University. Sometimes I'm also a visiting Professor of Marketing or Professor of Marketing and Communications at Copenhagen Business School. I've always been interested in the motivation or why people choose to buy the goods and services they do. Topic of my doctoral dissertation many years ago was the concept of involvement. What is it and how do you measure it? The topic of the talk today is really how that relates to people's buying and also their self-concept. My full CV and various other articles are listed in the website given below, if you wish to investigate anything else on this topic.
0:50
Our agenda today, includes first of all looking at consumer motivation and what are the antecedents, or what are the things that causes people to behave in the way they do. We're going to look at how our basic needs transform and support our consumer needs, and we're going to look at a couple of different classifications, or theories of needs and how they're formed. Then, we'll look at involvement as a motivational construct and look at ways to measure it to predict different consumer behaviors. Then, finally, I'm going to talk about self-concept. With specific example about self-concept and young people, and how this self-concept is interdependent with consumer behavior or why we buy.
1:36
Motivation refers to the processes that cause people to pay this they do. It occurs when a need is aroused and that the consumer wishes to satisfy. So once the need has been activated, a state of tension exists that drives the consumer to attempt to reduce or eliminate the need. This need may be utilitarian. For example, the desire to achieve some functional or practical benefit as when maybe a person wants a pair of very durable sneakers or maybe very hedonic. As experiential need involving emotional responses or fantasies as when someone buys Bessel running shoes for a triathlon. The desired end state is the consumer's goal. Marketers try to create products and services that will provide the desired benefits and permit the consumer to reduce this tension. Whether the need is utilitarian, or hedonic, a discrepancy exists between the consumer's present state and some ideal state. This gulf creates a state of tension. The magnitude of this tension determines the urgency the consumer feels to reduce the tension. This degree of arousal is called a drive. A basic need can be satisfied any number of ways and the specific path a person chooses is influenced by his or her unique set of experiences and by the values instilled by the culture in which the person has been raised.