Consumer Behavior

• Judgment and decision-making are important to marketers.
• Consumers face various types of decisions in situations where motivation, ability, and opportunity to process are high.
• Two types of cognitive decision-making models are identified and consumers make decisions based on brands, product attributes, and gains and losses.
• Affective decision-making models differ from cognitive decision-making models, and the role of appraisals and feelings, affective forecasting, and imagery in high-effort decisions is discussed.
• In a high-effort situation, consumers may delay a decision and make decisions when alternatives cannot be compared.
• Consumer characteristics, decision characteristics, and other people can influence high-effort decisions.
• Judgment is the evaluation of an object or estimation of likelihood of an outcome or event.
• Decision-making is the process of making a selection among options or activities, estimation of likelihood, and judgment of goodness or badness.
• Imagery is a process where consumers imagine an event in order to make judgments.
• Anchoring and adjustment is a process that starts with initial evaluation and adjusts it with additional information.
• Mental accounting is a process where consumers categorize spending and saving decisions into accounts mentally designated for specific consumption transactions, goal, or situations.
• Emotional accounting is a process where the intensity of positive or negative feelings associated with each mental account for saving or spending is discussed.
• Biases in judgment processes include confirmation, self-positivity, negativity, mood, prior brand evaluations, prior experience, and difficulty of mental calculations.
• Noncomparable decision involves making decisions about products or services from different categories.
• Brand versus Attribute Models: Brand processing involves comparing brands by attributes, while Attribute processing involves comparing brands by type.
• Lexicographic Model: Compares brands by attributes, one at a time in order of importance.
• Prospect theory suggests that losses have more influence than gains and that ownership increases the value of an item.
• Group decision making involves individual-alone goals and individual-group goals.
• Disjunctive Model: Sets acceptable cutoffs to find options that are good.
• Metacognitive experiences refer to how information is processed beyond the content of the decision.
• Multiattribute Expectancy-Value Model: Type of brand-based compensatory model.
• Attribute balancing involves picking a brand because it scores equally well on certain attributes.
• Expertise refers to detailed consumption vocabularies and good mood allows one to process information and more time to make a decision.
• Information availability and format affect decision making.
• Consumers tend to be more satisfied after making a feeling-based decision and emotions aid thought-based decisions.
• Extremeness aversion states that options extreme on some attributes are less attractive than those with a moderate level of those attributes.
• Alternative-based strategy involves choosing a brand based on overall evaluation, while attribute-based strategy involves choosing a brand based on abstract representations of comparable attributes.
• Time pressure leads to consumers’ failure to make intended purchases.
• Decision delay occurs if the decision is risky, uncertain, or involves an unpleasant task.
• Appraisal theory explains how one’s emotions are determined by how one appraises the situation and how and why certain emotions can affect future judgments and choices.
• Affective forecasting predicts how one will feel in the future and imagery plays a key role in emotional decision-making.
• Conjunctive Model: Sets minimum cutoffs to reject bad options.
• Elimination-by-Aspects Model: Similar to lexicographic model but adds the notion of acceptable cutoffs.
• Compromise effect states that brand gains share as it is an intermediate than an extreme option.
• Additive Difference Model: Brands are compared by attribute, two brands at a time.