Does Motivation and Involvement Lead to a Reflective Change of Consumers

Overview

About two decades ago, or when it was in the 20th century. The word 'High Fidelity' (also known as Hi-Fi) was totally irrelevant with China. While the world's famous hi-fi manufacturers are concentrated in the Europe, the United States and Japan. Since hi-fi began to sprout in China at the beginning of the 1990s that has been a lot of DIY products, with the slow process, some small scaled manufacturers established. After more than two decades of development, domestic hi-fi manufacturers are coming into a prosperous period, and we made some outstanding products in this period. A lot of classic products are the milestone of hi-fi industry has embarked into the market in recent years. Maybe in the next few years, the domestic hi-fi industry will still be in a high-speed development.

With the development of hi-fi industry，the word hi-fi has gradually became familiar with people in China, different kinds of BBS for discussing hi-fi audio equipments appeared accordingly and became the gathering place of audiophiles. As college students have a strong acceptance of new things, they become the main force in the consumption of hi-fi products, beginning the long course of 'fever' from the start of purchasing their first hi-fi headphones, some even spend a lot of money and crazy about it. Therefore, it is easy to see students wearing hi-fi headphones in university campus, author is also one of them. As we all know, the word 'hi-fi' and the word 'expensive' are indivisible, but audiophiles are quite generous in purchasing hi-fi audio equipments, so the pursuit of hi-fi equipment that might bring the wonderful sound quality experience is known as 'fever'. The design of hi-fi products has become increasingly younger, and the emergence of the consumer population also has a trend to point at the younger generation.

Aim and Objective

When discussed about consumer participation in the commercial act, the relationship between 'Flow', 'Situational Involvement' and 'Enduring Involvement' is often mentioned. Flow is one of the most suitable and ideal experience (Adam, 2009), according to the theory of motivation mentioned that 'flow' is a kind of appropriate state of mind with pleasant when a person feels that things are under control, or I am proficient in something. Thereby, they can feel happy and to enjoy this scene of satisfaction (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Study shows enduring involvement will lead to intrinsic motivation, situational involvement triggered extrinsic motivation (Laurent & Kapferer, 1985; Richins & Bloch, 1986). According to studies, flow and situational involvement will lead to concentration of attention with stimulating to some certain and limited areas, and then they will invest time and money on that interest. When consumers' attention is not focus on these things any more, they will be tired about it then transform their favor of investment to another more attractive and challenging activity, such behaviors are usually got explicit purpose. Flow and enduring involvement will lead to happy and positive emotions and to meet the scene of satisfaction during consumption process. Most of the time, when consumers fall into the enduring involvement mode in a process, they are pursuit of entertainment or leisure purposes.

Based on the literature of past, intrinsic motivation is frequently applied to explore in the field of participate behavior, including shopping, social network and gambling. The research results show that the intrinsic motivation will affect buying behavior through the joy they have in the process of consumption. We speculate that young consumers who buy hi-fi products are also influenced by the intrinsic motivation. So we chose intrinsic motivation as variables element of the research. Based on questionnaire designed, whether enduring involvement will affect intrinsic motivation, thereby affecting consumer' purchasing behavior is discussed.

Key objectives

1. To identify whether enduring involvement effect intrinsic motivation.

2. To discuss how consumers' purchasing behavior was influenced by intrinsic motivation.

3. To evaluate the relationship between intrinsic motivation and enduring involvement and the change of these two variables will lead to a reflective change of consumers' purchasing behavior.

Literature review

(1) Involvement

Definition of involvement

Involvement is personal cognition of the product relevance with their intrinsic needs, interests and values. (Zaichkowsky, 1985), is a kind of feeling of individuals in a particular time and a particular context of certain things (Celsi & Olson, 1988).

In general, involvement is a psychological status. Intensity of involvement with a specific thing is affected by individual needs, values and desire to achieve specific target. When the relevance is higher, the intensity of involvement gets higher also, and then creates a series of follow-up acts that concerned about it. Therefore, The involvement theory is a rational explanation of why consumers are not always based on rational decision-making mode. Due to the different research areas, involvement theory got different concepts and definitions. The following parts will discuss the classification of involvement theory in the perspectives of the phenomenon and the essence.

Classification of involvement

According to the individual behavior that dealing with the involvement objective, involvement can be divided in to three different types of: advertising involvement, product involvement and purchase decision-making involvement.

Advertising involvement refers to the consumers' level of interest in advertising information or the state of mind of when they come into contact with advertising. As a information involvement, advertising involvement is to affect consumers by collecting information, analysis the data and get the respond. Krugman (1965) claims that the low involvement advertising presentation will cause changes in the structure of the audience perception. What's more, the subtle changes of perception structure will lead to a increase the possibility to change audience's view of the advertising brand, and triggers such as brand purchase behavior.

Product involvement refers to the subjective consciousness of the product given by of consumers which is depend on the facts about extent of attention of the products, internal needs, interests and values, that is, the relevance of a product in the