Investigating the relationship between 'changes‘ in attitudes and purchase behaviour

Consumers' attitudes towards brands show great variability at the individual level, in spite of being steady, in the aggregate, between two successive interviews. While this mirrors well known patterns of "stochastic" buying behaviour, it raises the question of why individual variations in attitudinal responses occur. This paper investigates possible underlying sub-patterns in this variability. Specifically, we look at systematic sub-patterns between individual behaviour changes and individual attitude changes at two interviews. In practice, "heavier" buyers of a brand are found to give rather higher attitudinal responses than "lighter" buyers do. There are also further sub-patterns which are discussed in the paper.