Alexander Chernev
Executive Summary
Consumers often purchase multiple items from the same product category on a single shopping trip. In doing so, they must often choose among items that are grouped in assortments, such as those offered by a particular store or brand. This article examines how the number of to-be-purchased items influences consumer choice among assortments. The author argues that when consumers are uncertain in their preferences, they are likely to prefer an assortment for which the number of available options matches the number of to-be-purchased items. To illustrate, consider a consumer who is choosing snacks for a group of people with unknown preferences and must decide between two assortments—one that offers five options and one that offers seven options. The current research asserts that this consumer is more likely to choose snacks from the seven-item assortment when purchasing for seven people than when purchasing for five people. In the same vein, the author argues that retail promotions that encourage customers to buy a particular number of items (e.g., “buy two, get one free”) are likely to encourage customers to prefer three-item assortments to two-item and four-item assortments. These predictions are based on the notion that a match between the size of an assortment and the number of to-be-purchased items enables consumers to simplify the selection process by eliminating the need to trade off the benefits and costs of individual choice alternatives—a strategy referred to as the quantity-matching heuristic.
The decision process implied by the quantity-matching heuristic has counterintuitive implications about how the number of items to be purchased from a given category influences consumers’ preferences for variety. Conventional wisdom suggests that consumers will seek more variety as the number of items to be purchased from the same category increases. For example, when choosing between an assortment of five items and an assortment of ten items, a consumer purchasing five items should be less likely to choose the smaller, five-item assortment than a consumer purchasing three items. In contrast, this research argues that the preference for the five-item assortment is likely to be greater in the case of a five-item purchase than in the case of a three-item purchase.
The research propositions advanced in this article are supported by data from five experiments, documenting the use of the quantity-matching heuristic in different decision contexts. The data show that the quantity-matching heuristic is a function of decision uncertainty, such that consumers are more likely to rely on the quantity-matching heuristic when decision uncertainty is high than when it is low. This quantity-matching heuristic is also shown to be a function of decision accountability, such that its impact on choice is more pronounced when consumers expect to need to justify their decisions. The impact of the quantity-matching heuristic on choice among assortments is shown to be contingent on consumers’ preference for variety, such that consumers who seek variety are more likely to adopt the quantity-matching heuristic. This research also documents that the quantity-matching heuristic is influenced by the degree to which the cognitive costs associated with selecting an option from the available assortment are evident to consumers, such that consumers are more likely to adopt the quantity-matching heuristic when they are aware of the cognitive costs associated with choosing individual options from an already-selected assortment. The combined data from the experimental studies offer converging evidence for the quantity-matching heuristic and identify its moderating factors and boundary conditions.
From a managerial standpoint, this research suggests that in product categories in which consumers are likely to buy multiple items, matching the number of options in a given assortment to the number of the to-be-purchased items is likely to increase the choice likelihood of options from the matching assortment. With the advances in marketing intelligence and the increased efficiency of customizing product offerings, understanding the quantity-matching heuristic gives marketers an opportunity to differentiate their offerings by creating assortments that match consumers’ purchase-quantity goals. Thus, when the number of items to be purchased by a particular consumer in a given category can be readily estimated, companies can benefit from creating customized assortments of the size that matches consumers’ desired purchase quantity.
Biography
Alexander Chernev is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Sofia University and a PhD in Business Administration from Duke University. His research interests are in the areas of consumer judgment and decision making. He has published in leading academic journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLV, No. 2, April 2008
View Table of Contents.