Beyond the semiotic strait-jacket: Everyday experiences of advertising involvement

The involvement concept may well be the ‘terrible beauty’ of consumer behaviour. Adopted by rather than born into this discipline, it seems to have delivered more confusion and consternation than insight. Considering its fate, Belk (1995a) suggests that on the evidence to date, this ‘promising brain child’ was either stillborn or expired sometime during its troubled childhood. Others see it as dying if not already dead, to the extent that ‘reviewers and editors are already writing involvement’s eulogy’ (Muncy 1990:144). Such pessimistic prognoses arise because after thirty years of research, involvement remains an intriguing, intuitively appealing and ultimately elusive concept. This is certainly the case in an advertising context, where it seems relevant in two senses. First, involvement with goods, services, tasks or situations may influence consumers’ response to advertising. Second, ads themselves may be the object of consumers’ involvement.