Decision-Making Role and Information Processing

Abstract

While in the 1950's motivational researchers sought to uncover unconscious motives for consumers' purchases, lately marketers have been more concerned with the rational methods people use to process marketing information. For example, some researchers have established a series of buying decision rules [1, 3, 4, 11] and others have focused on cognitive structure-the interrelationship or overall structure of beliefs, values, ideas, and expectancies. One application of the cognitive structure approach has been to use the relationships among various product attributes or values to predict a person's attitudes toward a particular brand or product [2, 5, 9, 10, 12]. Another way of employing the cognitive structure approach is to study the influence of potential buyers' expectancies on the processing of product information. For example, a potential buyer may have certain expectancies regarding information flow depending on his role in the decision process. This study tested the proposition that because of differential expectancies about information flow, decision makers and non-decision makers process information differently. Specifically, this study explored the applicability of cognitive tuning theory in explaining such differences, since the theory posits that people activate different cognitive structures under different conditions of anticipating dealing with information.