Consumers make both low and high involvement purchase decisions. Low involvement decisions are quick and automatic while high involvement decisions take much more effort. A high involvement purchase decision can have low involvement steps and is shaped by a number of personal and situational factors.
Consumers make decisions that are either high involvement or low involvement, or anything in between. The degree to which a purchase decision is high involvement depends on the effort a given individual puts into it.
Some product categories tend to involve higher involvement purchase decisions than others. However, it can be dangerous to assume that just because your product belongs to a category typically considered high involvement then your customers must be highly involved when engaging with your brand.
This is because the degree of involvement is ultimately subjective and based on factors that are, to a great extent, out of your control.
There is more to decision making than meets the eye and wrapping your head around what is a high involvement purchase decision can actually be quite complicated.
In this short article, I’ll try to simplify that.
Low involvement vs high involvement purchase decisions
Low involvement purchase decisions are based on heuristics and are therefore largely automatic and don’t require a lot of effort. In its purest form, these decisions happen beneath consciousness; for example, putting one foot in front of the other when walking.
These fall under what Daniel Kahneman would call system 1 processing because they are fast and largely automatic.
High involvement purchase decisions on the other hand are much more tedious. They involve intentional rational and analytic thinking which uses a large amount of cognitive resources. They are slow and occur much less frequently than low involvement decisions.
Shelly Chaiken1Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 39(5), 752-766. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.752 conducted an experiment that illustrates well the different processing techniques. In the first experiment, she asked participants to read a persuasive message from a communicator. The communicator was either likable or unlikable and presented either six or two arguments. Participants who were highly involved changed their opinion significantly more when presented with six arguments and were unaffected by the communicator’s likability (a heuristic). In contrast, low involvement participants showed a greater opinion change when the communicator was likable but were not affected by the number of arguments.
In other words, the highly involved group was persuaded based on rationality and analytic thinking while the low involvement group was mainly persuaded by a heuristic. For the same reasons, people often make decisions based on attractive packaging design when they are under a condition of low involvement.
The overlap between high and low involvement
It’s sadly not as simple as two independent systems operating in different corners of the brain that each own their certain contexts and that this is true in all cases. They overlap.
Kahneman himself always intended the two systems explanation to be a simplification but in reality system 2 can also include system 1 processes2Evans, J. (2008). Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition. Annual Review Of Psychology, 59(1), 255-278. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629 and vice versa, though that is both to a lower extent and less common. By the same logic, a high involvement purchase decision may include one or several low involvement decisions.
If this confuses you then don’t pay too much attention to it. The most important thing is to remember that high involvement purchase decisions are slow, deliberate, sequential (consider the many steps you take in an informed decision) and limited to mental capacity3ibid. Evans, 2008 while low involvement decisions are much faster and may not use reasoning at all but favor habits and gut feelings.
When is a purchase decision high involvement?
As I said before, it’s dangerous to assume that a product is high involvement when making a purchase decision just because the product category is generally considered high involvement. Nevertheless, these are generalizations we often have to make because it’s impossible for us to know what goes on inside every customer’s mind at any given moment.
But, by knowing your customers well, you may be able to gain a better understanding of why they expand more efforts to certain purchase decisions. This happens mostly due to three reasons:4Sharp, B. (2018). Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice (2nd ed., pp. 37-38). Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia & New Zealand.
- The person is buying from a category for the first time.
- The person is deeply interested or passionate about the category.
- Making a bad decision can have significant bad outcomes.
First-time buyer
People tend to be more involved when buying for the first time from a category.
I recently got into cycling and bought my first road bike a few months back. I spent hours reading up on tips, bike components and different manufacturers as well as watching YouTube videos about both cycling in general and common mistakes when buying your first bike before I was eventually ready to make a purchase.
Another great example is first-time parents. Before, and for some period after, couples have babies they often obsess about what may seem like the most menial things because they have no first-hand experience to fall back on. Fear of bad outcomes such as purchasing something that is bad for your baby also come into play here.
High interest and passion
Hobbyists and activists are usually highly involved in their purchase decision. You can apply this to my road bike, a photographer buying new lenses, a musician looking at guitars, a gamer researching PC components or golfers seeking new clubs.
You may also find people being highly involved because they want to stay true to personal values. A vegan experiences relatively much more high involvement purchase decisions than does the average eater simply out of necessity. Likewise people who boycott products from a certain brand.
Risk of bad outcomes
No one wants to regret a purchase. This will likely not matter for a pack of gum picked of by the cash register but as the price goes up, so does the potential downside. This is an example of risk aversion; a psychological bias that nudges people to pick the more secure option even if the option that is perceived as more uncertain can yield significantly more benefits.
People may also demonstrate risk aversion based on endless situational and personal factors such as first-time parents wanting only the best for their child or spouses stressing about whether their significant other will like a gift or not.
Key takeaway
As you can see whether a decision is high involvement is not a case of either-or. What is high involvement depends on when person from the next and on the time of day or specific the specific situation you look at.
I said before that it could be dangerous to assume that your product is a high involvement purchase decision just because the product category is generally assumed to be. Yet, with limited resources, this is the most sensible way to move forward5ibid. Sharp, 2018 as long as you make the distinction yourself. Speak to your customers and get an idea of how they buy your brand, whether it tends to be life cycle related, based on interest or risk aversion or something else.
References
- 1Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 39(5), 752-766. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.752
- 2Evans, J. (2008). Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition. Annual Review Of Psychology, 59(1), 255-278. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629
- 3ibid. Evans, 2008
- 4Sharp, B. (2018). Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice (2nd ed., pp. 37-38). Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia & New Zealand.
- 5ibid. Sharp, 2018
