Chapter 9

• Judgment and Decision-Making in Low Consumer Effort is a chapter in the book "Consumer Behavior" by Cengage Learning.
• The chapter discusses the types of heuristics that consumers can use to make simple judgments.
• Marketers need to understand both unconscious and conscious decision-making processes in low-effort situations.
• Consumers learn to apply choice tactics through operant conditioning.
• Brand familiarity is a low-effort feeling-based strategy that consumers use to make purchase decisions.
• Sensation seekers express themselves in every product category.
• Consumers are motivated to relieve their boredom because their level of arousal falls below the optimal stimulation level (OSL).
• Vicarious explorers express themselves in some product categories and not in others.
• Consumers can be sensation seekers or vicarious explorers.
• Consumers seek variety due to satiation or boredom.
• Consumers make thought-based low-effort decisions using performance-related tactics, habit, brand loyalty, price-related tactics, and normative influences.
• Consumers make affect-based low-effort decisions using feelings as a simplifying strategy, brand familiarity, variety seeking, and impulse purchasing.
• Representativeness heuristic: Comparing a stimulus with the category prototype/exemplar
• Availability heuristic: Basing judgments on events that are easier to recall
• Base-rate information: How often an event occurs on average
• Law of small numbers: Expecting that information obtained from a small sample to characterize the larger population
• Performance-related tactics are used in cognitive decision making.
• Habit is a behavior characterized by little or no information seeking, little or no evaluation of alternatives, and developing repeat purchase behavior by shaping.
• Normative choice tactics are used when other individuals can influence consumers' low-elaboration decision making.
• Evaluation can be general or focused on a specific attribute or benefit.
• Price consciousness is not static.
• Decisions are based on affect referral, a tactic whereby people simply remember their feelings for the product or service.
• Customers have a zone of acceptance, which is the acceptable range of prices for any purchase decision.
• Low-effort feeling-based strategies are used in cognitive decision making.
• Multibrand loyalty is when consumers buy two or more brands repeatedly because of a strong preference for them.
• Based on benefits, features, or evaluations of a brand, used when the outcome of the consumption process is positive reinforcement.
• Affect-related tactics are based on feelings and do not necessarily result from a conscious recognition of need satisfaction.
• People may make a decision without being consciously aware of how or why they are doing so
• Conscious Low-Effort Decision-Making Hierarchy of effects for low-effort situations: Sequence of thinking, behaving, and feeling
• Affective processing: Sequence of feeling, behaving, and thinking
• Factors that influence low motivation, ability, and opportunity (MAO) process: Satisficing
• Using choice tactics