Consumer market beliefs and their managerial implications: An empirical examination

This article investigates a large number of consumer market beliefs related to key dimensions of products and marketing. The focus is on determining how widely held are these beliefs, and then what are the managerial implications of these results. This study provides a snapshot overview of how consumers view products and marketing today. Why bother?

Consumer market beliefs are an important and under-researched construct in consumer research. [They are important because] strongly held market beliefs serve to simplify consumer decision making by directing search and evaluation activities (Duncan, 1990).

While there has been extensive research on brand-specific beliefs and occasionally research on industry-specific beliefs, there has been little research at the level of highest generality of beliefs--market beliefs.

WHAT ARE CONSUMER MARKET BELIEFS?

Duncan (1990) pioneered the study of the concept of market beliefs. He defines them as "intermediate level beliefs that convey information about the association between independent [marketing] variables These are standard "beliefs", as discussed in the psychological literature, except that the belief object is a marketplace phenomenon or marketing tactic which is then associated with some implication of that belief object. More specifically, "many of the beliefs take the form of surrogate-based opinions expressing a relationship between an external product cue and some benefit or quality For example, one market belief Duncan identifies through exploratory interviews is: "Items that come in fancy packages are not a good value". This belief posits a negative association between fancy packaging (belief object) and value for the consumer dollar (implication). The expected impact of this belief would be, of course, to influence how a consumer responds to that type of packaging. We believe that widely held consumer market beliefs have important implications for consumer goods marketers.

Why do consumers have market beliefs? Consumers form these beliefs for the same reasons that we always form generalizations whenever possible--to simplify and speed up understanding and decision-making using learning from experience. Without market beliefs consumers would have to undertake an exhaustive analysis for every new product they encountered. Though the process of the impact of brand-specific prior knowledge on consumer behavior has received much attention in the marketing literature (Alsop, 1988; Rao and Munroe; 1988), general market beliefs are a type of prior knowledge that has received little notice....