Experiential and Informational Perspectives of Consumer Preference Consistency

SESSION OVERVIEW The notion of preference consistency lies at the roots of understanding, predicting, and influencing consumer behavior. Most marketing activities such as market segmentation, new product development, marketing communications, and customer management are based on the premise that consumers behave in somewhat consistent patterns. A substantial body of research in preference construction (see Lichtenstein & Slovic 2006 for a recent collection of work in this literature) has established that consumers do not always have stable preferences; in contrast, their preferences can be susceptible to a host of context effects such as changes in the number (Iyengar & Lepper 2000) or composition (e.g. Huber, Payne, & Puto 1982, Simonson 1989) of the choices they have. This session brings together a series of three papers that examine how thinking about one’s consumption experiences and given product information in different ways can differentially affect the consistency and stability of one’s preferences. Specifically, the degree of consistency in consumers’ preferences can change as a result of how consumers think about their related retrospective consumption experiences, the given attribute information of the products to be consumed, and the associations between these products and consumers’ self identities. Using a series of four experiments in three distinct domains— food, social interaction, and music—Galak, Redden, and Kruger demonstrate that making more salient related (vs. unrelated) intervening experiences since the last consumption episode can reduce the degree of product satiation and enhance the consistency of preferences over time. Simply having a wide variety of experiences might not be enough for consumers to recover from satiation since consumers tend to experience “variety amnesia;” rather, for consumers to “restore” their preferences to the products they most preferred and to maintain consistent preferences over time, thinking about the variety of their past related experiences might be essential. On the other hand, Lee, Bertini, and Ariely find that how consumers think about the given product information can also influence the consistency of their preferences. In particular, they examine how the availability of price information can impact consumers’ preference consistency given the inherent imprecision of mapping between monetary assessments and predicted utility. The results of a series of five experiments converge toward the same conclusion: when consumers think about prices during their purchase decisions, their choices are less consistent and transitive. Interestingly, price conscious consumers who are chronically more adept at thinking about how prices can affect their utility are less susceptible to such a negative effect of price consideration on preference consistency. Nonetheless, the consistency of consumers’ preferences over time depends not only on how consumers think about given product attributes but also the relationships between these products and their self identities. Through a series of three studies, Amir and Mazar show that consumers’ preferences for products or experiences that are closely associated to consumers’ self identities, when these identities are formed (e.g. during adolescence) or significantly changed (e.g. due to a life changing event such as marriage), will remain relatively stable throughout consumers’ lives. Such preference consistency does not apply to products that are not associated with consumers’ identities and does not depend solely on the consumers’ age or the novelty of the products. Overall, given the fundamental relevance of these papers’ topics to consumers’ every day lives, this special topic session should be of great interest not only to marketing researchers and psychologists, but also to anyone who is fascinated by the factors that determine how consistent our preferences are over time.