Introduction
The consumer involvement theory has become an important topic in marketing and consumer behavior research for several decades. Involvement is believed to explain a great part of consumer purchase decisions (Quester et al., 2003). Consumers involved in different levels, their behaviors diverse. The researches on the degree of involvement help to explore how to stimulate different consumers ' willingness and action to achieve the purpose of marketing, reflecting the significance of the theory for companies in making marketing strategy. Yet there are some problems in defining and measuring involvement which tend to limit the usefulness of the theory. To examine the usefulness of consumer involvement theory, some questions need to be answered: how could involvement influence consumers’ purchase decision and companies’ marketing strategies? And how to measure the degree of involvement? This assignment will introduce the theory of consumer involvement, explain the relationship between consumer involvement and marketing strategies making, and then explicate the different measurements of involvement and difficulty in measuring. Finally, a conclusion will be given.
Consumer involvement theory
Although the study of involvement originated in the 1960s and well established in recent years, there is no consensus on how to define and measure the involvement (Cohen, 1983). The concepts of involvement in the marketing domain was firstly proposed by Krugman (1966). There is