An Integrated Model of Consumer Involvement Based on Fuzzy Automata

Involvement has become an important variable in consumer behavior and marketing research for a long time. Large amount of literature about involvement has existed now, and different types of involvement have been proposed, and so has the measurement of involvement. In real world, every consumer's decision-making process is not affected by just single involvement, but we are hard to find the research which discusses many antecedents, consequences, and more than one type of involvement at the same time from the existing literature. Because an individual's opinions and attitude have the characteristics of complexity and uncertainty, the data from investigation do not necessarily present a subject's inner minds. This study makes the most of the fuzzy sets, which solve uncertain and imprecise conditions, to transform the opinions belonging to human beings into the more accurate quantity. Consumer involvement is regarded as the object for this empirical study that comprehensively collects plenty of antecedents and consequences for consumer involvement. Especially, consumer involvement is categorized into product involvement, advertising involvement, purchase involvement, situational involvement, and enduring involvement to further discuss their interactions. We take advantage of the fuzzy automata that the inner operation resembles the development of consumer involvement for individuals to develop an integrated model of consumer involvement. The empirical results indicate that in addition to the selection of implications, a fitting model relies on the selection of compositions in the fuzzy automata. The fuzzy automata not only can deal with a great number of variables at the same time, but the interaction between different types of involvement as well.