Understanding Consumer Information PDF

**Understanding Consumer Information** A large supermarket contains thousands of brands whose packaging includes a lot of information. Often consumers do not have time to read all this information and make the best purchasing decisions. Instead they use various strategies to make their choices. Res...

**Understanding Consumer Information** A large supermarket contains thousands of brands whose packaging includes a lot of information. Often consumers do not have time to read all this information and make the best purchasing decisions. Instead they use various strategies to make their choices. Research suggests that a number of factors other than budget can influence consumers when they do this. Sometimes the information is deliberately false. A typical example of this is when a manufacturer's statement that a product is 'less fattening' than another is true only because the portion sizes are much smaller. In other cases, information is deliberately unclear and the consumer reads it positively. For example, a manufacturer may call a product 'not expensive', which the consumer interprets as 'cheap'. Mistakes can also happen when consumers judge a brand by its similarity with another brand. Thus a consumer may assume that a new brand has the same ingredients as more familiar brands. Likewise, consumers may believe that a brand has certain characteristics because they feel that certain things are likely to go together. For example, consumers often think that higher prices are associated with higher quality. This is not always true. Even when information is clearly and accurately presented, consumers are not always aware of this. Only one third of the consumers interviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration knew that the ingredients recorded on a food product label are listed in order of weight. Similarly, the way items are described may affect consumers' judgements. When people had to choose between the same meat that was labeled either as '75 percent lean' or as '25 percent fat', they always chose the '75 percent lean'. This pattern continued even after they had tasted the meat. Another problem is that consumers sometimes say one thing but do another. For example, 94 percent of Americans say that they are concerned about health. In particular, they are concerned about fat, salt, cholesterol and sugar and want healthy alternatives to buy. But the presence of healthy alternatives does not necessarily affect purchase behavior. As one executive stated recently in an article on consumer behavior: 'People feel okay eating a cheeseburger when they're looking at a healthy salad bar with fresh vegetables'. These biases in information gathering are very common. However, consumers who are made aware of them often dramatically improve their decision-making.