Considerations of the Theory of Planned Behaviour
Another theory that explains how marketers market products to consumers, which is a tool used in Baking Fashion Marketing to predict purchasing behaviours, is the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). According to this action theory, consumer’s intentions to behave is influenced by intentions to act, which is a consequence of his/her attitudes, subjective norms from the environment and perceived behavioural controls. In addition, personality, age, occupation, gender and others have no impact on intentions to behave (Ajzen 1991). Practically, the TPB has been used as a framework to conceptualise, measure, and empirically identifying factors that determine behavioural intentions and engagement in behaviour (Chen 2008).
In this way, the TBP and the self-perception theory outlines how people create their own behaviours dependent on other people’s perceptions from group norms in perceived behavioural control (Albarracin et al. 2005; Bem 1967; Ajzen 1991). For example, in a study on humour attitudes, participants responded with behaviours in contradiction to their own attitudes, without being aware of the change, after being conditioned to lie (Bem 1967). This shows that behaviours can be manipulated to contradict people’s innate attitudes, meaning that marketers can advertise products that contradict with innate attitudes. In addition, the MODE model was created by researches Fazio and Towes-Shwen (1999) to demonstrate the conscious continuum of different levels of involvement in the creation of attitudes. However, a study on the collectivist culture of India has found that subjective norms do not affect consumers as much as marketers predicted (Kumar 2012).
Subsequently, and in improvement of the TPB, research has shown that attitudes influence intentions to behave more than perceived behavioural control and subjective norms, in terms of environmentally sustainable products (Yakasai and Jusoh 2015; Kumar 2012; Austin 2014). For example, it was found that knowledge influences attitude and purchasing behaviour of environmentally sustainable products and organic foods (Kumar 2012; Austin 2014). In terms of measuring consumers attitudes, it is important to understand that they are complex and influenced by three different components: affective, behavioural and cognitive (Eagly and Chaiken 1998). Therefore, marketers should be looking at all three components when measuring attitudes to influence purchasing intentions in the TPB (Ostrum 1967; Harari 1967; Samra 2014). In addition, attitudes are complex, interconnected and multidimensional with multiple paths of associative networks, and should not be assumed as general attitudes (Gass and Seiter 2011). In this way, marketers should understand the complexity of attitudes, that they may not be understood by the consumer.
In addition, the self-monitoring theory explains the different levels of controlling behaviours, and how people can control their behaviours to create attitudes (Gangestad and Snyder 1985 p.322; Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). In this way, marketers should advertise product quality in terms of image-orientated adverts to consumers with high self-monitoring personalities (those who are driven to fit into society socially), whereas marketers should incorporate quality-orientated advertisements to low self-monitoring individuals who are influenced by personal values (DeBono and Packer 1991).
Therefore, the TPB outlines the framework to market products to consumers. This website will be analysing this framework in different baking fashion trends. See Trends.