Consumer involvement: a new perspective

Involvement's importance in marketing and consumer research has been well established for twenty years. The concept has been linked to various consumer behaviour and marketing constructs and has been used to classify products and advertising messages according to the level of involvement they arouse. Apart from its academic and research value, involvement has implications for practitioners. Thus involvement can be used to segment consumers into low, moderate and high involvement groups which can then be targeted with different promotional strategies. There is a plethora of views on involvement which need to be integrated in order to provide a thorough account which will facilitate researchers. This paper provides a coherent and summarizing synthesis of the extant literature on involvement and presents a new perspective of involvement by linking purchase involvement to channel choice.