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Pre-Master Marketing Management – Articles; longArticle 1
Title: On consumer beliefs about quality and taste
Authors: Stephen A. Spiller & Lena Belogolova
Year: 2017
Key words: product differentiation, perceived quality, preferences, beliefs, reasoning, inference
Summary:
This research characterizes consumer beliefs about product differentiation: are the differences
between products matters of quality or taste. Multiple paradigms across multiple sets of products
suggest that consumers hold discrepant beliefs about matters of quality and taste. Those beliefs are
meaningful: they affect consumer willingness to pay and consumer reasoning.
Relevance:
It is important to do research on this topic, because these beliefs affect willingness to pay and
consumers’ reasoning about their own choices and those of others.
Previous Research:
Perceived quality is the consumer’s judgement about a product’s overall excellence or superiority. The
researchers use it to mean a consumer’s beliefs about whether a set of products can be ranked by
quality. The distinction between matters of quality and taste parallels with the one between beliefs
about objectivity and subjectivity. This leads to perceived objectivity (perceived quality + objectivity =
perceived objectivity). Perceived objectivity is related to two related concepts:
1. Consumers differ in how much they prefer one option to another.
2. It may be defined independently of perceived consensus, although empirically they may often
covary.
Research questions + hypotheses:
RQ: What are the consumers’ beliefs and how do they differ across consumers for different sets of
products and how can this be affected by quality and taste?
H1: The difference in willingness to pay (WTP) between products increases with perceived objectivity.
H2: The use of self-reference in choice explanations decreases with perceived objectivity.
H3: Observing other consumer’s contradictory choices can decrease perceived objectivity.
H4: Perceived objectivity increases the likelihood that consumers draw rank-order inferences from
other’s choices.
Methodology:
Study 1 – 3: perceived objectivity & WTP & self-referencing (H1 + H2)
Study 1A – 1C: relationships between perceived objectivity and WTP and self-reference.
Study 2A – 2B: manipulation of perceived objectivity.
Study 3: secondary data analysis on self-referencing.
Study 4 – 6: perceived objectivity & reasoning about other’s choice (H3 + H4)
Study 4 – 5: whether reasoning through others’ choices of incompatible options affects perceived
objectivity.
Study 6A – 6B: how inferences depend on perceived objectivity.
,Pre-Master Marketing Management – Articles; long
Results + conclusion:
Study 1A – 1C: consumers choosing from sets they believe are matters of quality (vs. taste) are willing
to pay more for their preferred option (H1 confirmed). Moreover, consumers incorporate these beliefs
into their reasoning processes. Consumers self-reference more when explaining choices that are
matters of taste than when explaining choices that are matters of quality (H2 confirmed).
Study 2A – 2B: in study 1A – 1C, correlations of perceived objectivity for brands with rich
representations were found. In study 2A – 2B, causal effects of perceived objectivity for products in a
controlled context were found.
Study 3: we found that self-referencing, here a proxy for low perceived objectivity, helped account for
deviant evaluations in a natural language dataset.
These studies rule out two alternative interpretations of what our perceived objectivity measure may
have meant to participants. First, perceived objectivity was not just interpreted as a strong preference.
Second, perceived objectivity did not just mean that other consumers would choose the same option.
Study 4: Perceived objectivity is sensitive to consumers’ reasoning processes.
Study 5: Perceived objectivity was analyzed as a function of transitivity using multinomial logistic
regression with personal preference as the reference category.
Study 4 + 5: H3 confirmed.
Study 6: the likelihood of making transitive inferences based on multiple consumers’ choices increases
with perceived objectivity (H4 confirmed).
In general:
1. For a variety of sets of products, consumers hold divergent (uiteenlopende) beliefs about
whether the difference between products in a given set are matters of quality or taste.
2. Quality beliefs (vs. taste beliefs) lead to larger differences in willingness to pay between
products.
3. Quality beliefs (vs. taste beliefs) lead to a reduced focus on one’s self when explaining one’s
choices
4. When customers believe sets are more about quality than taste, consumers are more willing
to integrate across others’ choices to draw inferences about unknown consumers’ choices.
5. Making sense of a set of contradictory choices increases the likelihood of believing the set is
a matter of taste vs quality.
Usage:
Step 3, strategy formulation: customer segmentation, product positioning
Step 4, tactical program formulation: pricing policy
Real-life example (beer):
If consumers believe the beer is better (quality), they are willing to pay more for it.
Limitations:
- Do the conclusions hold in more complex, realistic situations?
- What makes one believe an attribute is a matter of quality?
- How does one weight different attributes among each other?
- Can companies influence what one perceives to be the dominant decision attribute?
, Pre-Master Marketing Management – Articles; long
Article 2
Title: What makes It green? The role of centrality of green attributes in evaluations of the greenness
of products
Authors: Andrew D. Gershoff & Judy K. Frels
Year: 2015
Key words: environmental decisions, green product evaluations, product attributes, centrality,
categorization
Summary:
In this research, the researchers explore factors that influence how consumers evaluate greenness of
a product depending on the attribute that offers the green benefit. If a central attribute offers a green
benefit, the product is perceived as more environmentally friendly compared with when a peripheral
attribute provides it. If a product is more environmentally friendly, consumers are willing to pay more.
Relevance:
An increasing body of research addresses consumers’ green product purchasing behavior, but little
work has examined how consumers form perceptions of the greenness of products in the first place.
Consumers are willing to pay more for environmental products if they are confident that the products
are truly environmentally friendly. To this date, no research has investigated how consumers form
evaluations about the greenness of a product. To address this research gap, this study focuses on
understanding how imbuing or modifying a single feature or attribute of a product with a green benefit
influences consumers’ evaluation of the overall greenness of the product.
Previous Research:
The greenness of a product has become more and more important to customers. Firms respond to this
by introducing products that include components made with materials that reduce environmental
impact. However, one element may be environmentally friendly, that doesn’t mean that all of the
components are environmentally friendly. Consumers are likely to judge some products as more green
and others as less green. If, as we argue, the centrality of a green attribute influences the overall
perception of a product’s greenness, manipulation factors that influence the perceived centrality of an
attribute should influence the relationship between green features and overall green perception.
There are two methods of altering perceptions of centrality:
- Category identification (study 2): if the centrality of green attributes influences evaluations of
products’ greenness, people will perceive the product to be greener when its recycled parts
are considered to be central due to its categorization.
- Attribute dependency (study 3): dependency will change the centrality of product features
such that for otherwise less central features or attributes that offer a green benefit, increased
dependency between the target feature and other product features will increase overall
evaluations of product greenness.
In summary, previous research on green decision making has examined evaluations of and inferences
about products that are already known to be green. In this research, characteristics of products that
lead to green evaluations in the first place are explored.
Research questions + hypotheses:
RQ: What determines the extent to which the overall product is perceived as green?
H1: Having a central attribute with an environmental benefit will imbue the entire product with
greenness more so than when a peripheral attribute offers equivalent environmental benefits.
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