Content area
Full Text
Keywords Consumer behaviour, Cognition
Abstract In this paper, an interesting paradox is demonstrated - when consumers pay a great deal of attention to product and price information in an advertisement, they are likely to find themselves lacking the cognitive resources required to use that information in making a discerning assessment of the value of the product offering. Using three studies, it is shown that paying close attention to product- and price-related information details causes cognitive busyness, which can cause consumers to engage in a greater degree of heuristic processing than those who are cognitively less busy. It is demonstrated that, when consumers are cognitively busy, they are less likely to accurately assess the value of price discount offers. Such cognitively busy consumers generally disregard the magnitude of the discount and the actual savings offered in forming their assessments of value for the offer. Non-busy consumers, on the other hand, perceive differences in value as magnitude of discounts, price, or quality of product features being altered. Implications for managers and consumers are discussed.
Introduction
In their seminal paper, Petty et al. (1983) demonstrated that, under high involvement conditions, product information in advertisements impacted product-related attitudes more than under low involvement conditions. Along the lines of involvement, researchers have identified two common behaviors in the context of consumers being exposed to advertisements - directed search and browsing (Elliott and Speck, 1998), where directed search is likely to reflect high involvement and browsing is more likely under low involvement. A consumer conducting a directed search is more inclined to pay attention to advertisement information, whereas the browser is akin to a "window-shopper". Can one of these types of consumer process information in an advertisement assist more effectively than the other in making an assessment of the product? Can one more effectively compare product features with the advertised price to estimate the value that one is getting? It may seem obvious that the direct searcher who pays greater attention to the information would be able to do this better than the browser. In our studies, we show that this is not the case. We demonstrate that consumers who pay greater attention to information details are less likely to use the information in forming the "big picture" (viz....