The Hindu Business Line : Low-involvement, my foot!

The concept of `high involvement' products relies on the belief that consumers pay more attention to high-priced items. This does not hold good anymore.

Toothpaste: A lifetime's use is hardly low-involvement.

MY brand of blood (whatever it is) boils when I hear the best of practising marketing persons refer to products and categories as `High Involvement' and `Low-Involvement'. It is a worrisome trend when the best of marketing men and women alike fail to move away from the antediluvian tendencies of these two old words that brand practitioners have been wedded to for so many years. Is there anything that we use as a brand or a product category `low-involvement' at all? Think.

The classic example of a low-involvement product is the humble toothpaste. The toothpaste is low-involvement because we use it so often, it is so inexpensive an item of purchase, there is a whole host of clutter in the category, and the consumer hardly spends too much of his grey matter on the purchase.

The even more classic example of a high-involvement product is that of the motorcar. The car that costs quite a bit, is once-in-a-lifetime kind of purchase, and something that makes the mind of the consumer do gymnastics before the purchase decision is made.

I say there is no product or service that is low-involvement. Everything we buy, use and want to use is high-involvement and very, very high-involvement at that.

The debate rages on. Practitioners and academics who believe the toothpaste is a low-involvement product category take several routes in buffeting their hypothesis. The big one is price. Toothpaste costs Rs 30 a purchase occasion and a car costs Rs 3 lakh. What costs Rs 3 lakh must most certainly be `high-involvement'.

Wrong! Look at it this way. My way.

A tube of toothpaste costs Rs 30. A car costs Rs 3 lakh. A car does indeed look as if it costs 10,000 times more than the price of the paste at hand. But this is not true. The average Indian possibly buys a car once in a lifetime, but buys a toothpaste at least once a month. If that were to be true, good old Mrs Somanna buys into the tooth-whitening category at least 900 times in her lifetime. Multiply that with the price and Mrs Somanna is forking out as much as Rs 27,000 on her dose of toothpaste! And the car costs just about 10 times more than the toothpaste in her brand-besotted life!

Look at other categories then. You are most likely going to smoke away Rs 12 lakh in cigarettes that you will buy by the pack. Slowly, but surely! And that is four times greater in value than the car you bought!

The Parachute coconut oil in your hair, the Lakme lipstick on your pouting lips, the Chambor polish on your nails and the Dreamflower talc perfuming you is possibly more high-involving a category than that two-wheeler you bought the other day.

The reasoning of `high-involvement' and `low-involvement' products lie in an old concept that imagined that the human mind paid a lot more attention to products that cost more on a single purchase occasion. This proposition does not hold good anymore.

Take another jibe then. The mythical `high-involvement' product is bought rarely and once in a lifetime. The decision-making process is possibly longer. The parameters sought to make that decision might indicate that a great deal of caution is exercised in this decision process. The time to decision is long as well. The research involved in purchase-decision making is laborious as well. But all of this does not mean that the category is really `high-involving'.

Look at it from the perspective of the market-watcher. A buyer of toothpaste buys into the category at least 900 times in a lifetime. These are 900 purchase-touch occasions for the consumer and the brand. Nine hundred possible occasions when the consumer can exhibit his classic decision-making matrix on the repurchase. Nine hundred real occasions for the consumer to wander away from pre-decided brand choice.

The reality lies in the fact that the consumer makes a very quick decision on every one of these 900 occasions. Toothpaste is a high-involvement category, really. The decision he or she makes will decide the state of his or her dental hygiene and well-being. The consumer makes the choice every time, in a nano-second. But don't for heaven's sake ignore the value of this decision-making process. It is quick, but nevertheless traverses the decision-making process that all of us follow so meticulously in the purchase of a high-value car. Literally, every bit of it in fast motion.

The debate on `high involvement' and `low-involvement' products will rage on. Even as this rages, it is important for the brand manager to understand that the low single-purchase value of a brand does not make it `low-involvement'. Instead, it makes the category a tricky one to survive in and dominate. Brands that face the consumer purchase occasion more in their life cycle are much more prone to brand-substitutability. The consumer does indeed have that many more occasions in the low single-purchase value category to be brand-promiscuous.

On the contrary, once you buy a car, it is indeed quite a bit like your long-time marriage. For good or for worse. `Till death do us part'. Touche!

(The author is a brand domain specialist and CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Feedback can be sent to bleditor@thehindu.co.in.)

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