Consumer involvement in financial services : an empirical test of two measures.

JURNAL SOFTSKILL
ABDULLAH H ALDLAIGAN

Abstract
This study reports an empirical test of two involvement scales : zaichkowsky’s personal involvement inventory (PII) and kapferer and laurent’s consumer involvement profile(CIP). The purpose of this study is to identify whether these two scales. Eight financial services are investigated : the use of a cheque book, overdraft facility, the use of switch services , the use of a chas machine, saving account , investment services , mortgage services, and personal loan. The empirical findings show that the two scales indicate different level of involvement in the eight financial service. The PII measure indicates that mortgage, invesment and chas machine use are high involvement services. The use of saving account , personal loan, a chequebook, overdraft facilty, and switch services are found to be medium involvment services. The CIP shows that investment, mortgage, and savings accounts are rated as high involve-ment service. Personal loans, overdraft facilities, switch card, chash machane, and chequebook usage are in the middle rangge of involvement. Being a multidimen-sional scale, the CIP provides more data about involvement. More investigation is needed in order to understand the links between consumer involvement in financial service and customer behavice and customer behavior. The authours conclude with recommendations for further research into consumer invelvoment in financial services and its effect on bank customer behavior


Introduction
Despite a gwowing volume of research on consumers and financial services financial , our understanding of consumer behavior in this area remains partical. However, an understanding of the factors that affect both evaluation of diffrent financial services and the final purchase decision is of importance to both academics and practitioners. One factors which is the level of consumer involvement (Foxall and pallister,1998)


Literature review

Involvement : operationalisation in marketing
The literatur on involment shows that there are three major domains of involvement , which are considered by marketing researchers. These domains are:
• Advertising domain;
• Product classdomain; and
• Purchasing decision domain
(Zaichkowsky, 1986).
The involvement literature indicates that these three domains are related to each other in the sense of their personal relevance. Personal relevance is claimed to be a focal theme of involvement research, since involvement definitions lack consistency (Zaichkowsky , 1986; arora, 1982; Greenwald and leavitt, 1984).
The involvement constuct has many times been operationalised to measure one or more of the three domains. Slama and Tashchian (1985) developedd a measure of global involvement for the purchase situation. Based on sherif and cantril’s (1947) argument that people can develop many diffrent types of involvement (e.g.involvement with activities , objects , ideas, social issues , etc.), they argue that purchasing, as an people could become involved. Mittal (1988,1989)uses Zajonc’s (!980) thesis for developing a measure of involvement by applying an affective choise model. The consumers is viewed in the affective choise model as an information processing system. The idea of the low involvement consumer who does not process much information when product choise is unimportant or the purchase situation is uninvolving is incorporated into this model.
zaichkowsky

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