E-Marketing Professionals

Attitudes/Opinions

Some authors distinguish between attitudes and opinions, while others use the terms interchangeably. Most typically attitude is used to refer to an individual's "preference, inclination, views or feelings toward some phenomenon," while opinions are "verbal expressions of attitudes." Since attitudes are typically secured from respondents by questioning, we shall not make the distinction between the terms but will treat attitudes and opinions interchangeably as representing a person's ideas, convictions, or liking with respect to a specific object or idea.

Attitude is one of the more important notions in the marketing literature, since it is generally thought that attitudes are related to behavior. Obviously, when an individual likes a product he will be more inclined to buy it than when he does not like it; when he likes one brand more than another, he will tend to buy the preferred brand. Thus, marketers are often interested in people's attitudes toward the product itself, their overall attitudes with respect to specific brands, and their attitudes toward specific aspects or features possessed by several brands.