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Unit 13: Consumer Decision-making Process

shop and seeks advice from the pharmacist as to which remedy would be effective and safe and Notes
buys the brand. The decision here would be based on internal and external information. This
type of decision approach is called limited decision-making.
In case of high involvement purchases, the relative importance of external information search
tends to increase. In general, it seems the type of information sought by a consumer depends on
what she/he already knows. If the consumer possesses little knowledge about available
alternatives, the tendency is to learn about the existence of alternatives and after acquiring
sufficient information, to redirect efforts towards learning more about the attributes of available
alternatives to develop suitable evaluative criteria and evaluate them. Purchase decisions of this
type involving perceived risk, extensive information search, and serious evaluation efforts are
called extended decision-making.

Sources of external information include:
1. Relatives, friends, neighbours, and chat groups.
2. Professional information from handouts, pamphlets, articles, magazines, journals, books,
professional contacts, and the Internet.
3. Direct experience through trial, inspection, and observation.
4. Marketer initiated efforts included in advertisements, displays, and salespeople.
Besides recalling and learning about the availability of different solutions, an important objective
of information collection is to determine appropriate evaluative criteria. These criteria are the
standards and specifications that the consumer uses in evaluating products and brands. The
consumer establishes what features or attributes are required, to meet her/his needs. For several
types of products such as computer, car, cell phone and others, these criteria may vary from
consumer to consumer. In most cases, consumers usually undertake brand processing or attribute
processing. Brand processing involves evaluating one brand at a time on several attributes, then
a second, and so on in the evoked set. Attribute processing involves examining a specific attribute
and comparing other brands on that attribute. In this manner, one by one, a second, a third, or
fourth attribute may be selected for comparison.
The information collection yields an awareness set of brands/products. Awareness or
consideration set is composed of recalled and learned about solutions. Awareness set contains
evoked set, inept set, and inert set.
Evoked set is composed of those brands the consumer will evaluate to choose the solution of a
particular problem or need. Inept set includes those brands that the consumer finds unworthy of
consideration. Inert set is composed of alternatives that the consumer is aware of but would not
consider buying and would treat with indifference.
Marketing Strategy

Marketers realise that two dimensions of the information search that consumers engage in have
relevance to strategy development (1) the type of purchase decision affects the amount of
information search and (2) the nature of consumers’ evoked set determines the direction of
search. Based on these two dimensions, marketers have a choice of choosing six strategies:
1. Maintenance strategy
2. Disrupt strategy

3. Capture strategy
4. Intercept strategy

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