The low involvement challenge

We were discussing organic tea in my class on consumer behaviour. The team that was presenting the consumer behaviour analysis of organic tea buying surmised that a new brand should use online influencers to spread the word. But they also said that organic tea was a low involvement product. At that stage I could not help myself but ask the team, “If organic tea is low involvement, why will a consumer spend time reading blogger reviews? Did we not learn that when a product is low involvement, consumers get into an auto-repurchase routine, what we call routinised buyer behaviour?”

This led to a healthy debate on what is low involvement and how there could be different shades of low involvement.

We know that buying tea or coffee or soap or toothpaste is a low involvement purchase. In contrast, a car or a mobile phone is a high involvement purchase. In the case of a low involvement purchase, you know what you bought the last time, and as long as the usage experience was not disappointing, you will end up buying the same brand once again. When it is low involvement, you don’t go through the long routine of an elaborate information search, store visits or seek expert opinion or evaluation to purchase.

The first time low involvement/high involvement and thinking/feeling was brought into the brand communication debate was when Robert Vaughn wrote his seminal article in 1980 in the Journal of Advertising Research. The creation of what is still called the “FCB Grid” led to a spate of other researches, including one by Rossiter and Percy in 1991, which incidentally is still taught in B-schools. These researches as well as those done by Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, which created the “Elaboration Likelihood Model [ELM]”, made it clear that consumers don’t want to spend time thinking about routine purchases.

So advertising for such products should be simple and emotional.

Does this mean that low involvement products are forever trapped in the low attention-low involvement loop? Is there a way to break out of it?

Marketers have to try and see how to get consumers “involved” in order to change behaviour. And this cannot happen automatically. One obvious solution is to create an advertising property that resonates emotionally with the consumer. This should help the brand retain its old base of consumers and also attract new users through simple new emotional appeals.

I submit there could be a new way to infuse energy into products that are caught in a low involvement trap. That is through the introduction of new variants that question the consumer’s basic beliefs about products. Take tea, for instance. Tea is tea is tea. So a consumer is trapped in a cycle of repeating the same brand or doing tactical brand switches based on price offers. What will make them reevaluate their low involvement cycle?

This can happen if in the same category you bring out a new product. Organic tea is a good example. It claims to be grown without pesticides. Now add to that some herbs, say turmeric. Organic Turmeric Tea is no longer an old known product.

The consumer, if we were to use the ELM, will not use the peripheral processing model because they don’t know if OTT [Organic Turmeric Tea] is worth its price. So they will search for information. And if they see that an influencer they follow has actually written about a new brand of OTT, they can get swayed.

So even boring, low involvement products can become exciting and interesting when they create innovations that go against the grain of consumer understanding. In my own experience, I remember a large FMCG brand that in a particular year launched two big extensions. Unfortunately, both did not succeed. What we discovered was that while the new introductions did not meet their objectives, the mother brand ended up showing its highest ever growth that year.

I should warn that this strategy is not for the faint hearted. It is possible that unstructured new introductions could damage the equity of the mother brand. But if done well, a well-oiled new product machine can help strong brands become stronger.

The new offerings may succeed, then it is a win-win. But even if they fail, they may help the mother product and you are in a better place than just doing more and more funny ads [with celebrities] for the same old product.

The writer is an independent brand coach and a best-selling author. His latest book is Spring – Bouncing Back From Rejection. He can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com