Attitude, Behavior and Marketing Strategy In Food and Other Motivated Choice : A Bird’s Eye View of Two Decades of Research

Abstract:

Attitude and behaviour in food and many other lifestyle products have for long been known as having affective and cognitive bases that must be carefully considered in the design of branding, advertising, and other marketing strategies. More recently, these have been studied as “motivated” choices. Beyond conscious affects and cognitions, the motivated nature of food and lifestyle attitudes and behavior is also tied to biological reinforcement, environmental triggers, and to diverse neurocognitive processes of impulsivity and executive control, with the brain serving as the command center guiding this complex dynamics in real time. Even for these everyday choices, the human brain does not operate as a simple stimulus-response machine. Perceptions, choices and behaviours emerge from a complex admixture of psychological processes, internal “pushes” such as hunger, and external “pulls” such as the array of alluring stimuli that populate our environment. This seminar will provide a bird eye’s view of the last two decades of research on attitude, behaviour and marketing strategy in food and other domains of motivated choice. The presentation will be anchored in three of Dube’s papers published a decade apart. Discussion will bear on insights these may provide for seminar participants’ research and for 21st Century consumer and marketing research in general