brand choice behaviour

Brand Choice Behavior as a Function of Information Load: Replication and Extension
Author(s): Jacob Jacoby, Donald E. Speller and Carol Kohn Berning
Source: Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jun., 1974), pp. 33-42
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2488952
Accessed: 21-09-2019 13:15 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2488952?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Journal of Consumer Research
This content downloaded from 194.254.129.28 on Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Brand Choice Behavior as a Function of
Information Load: Replication
and Extension
JACOB JACOBY
DONALD E. SPELLER,
CAROL KOHN BERNING*
The hypothesis that finite limits exist to the amount of information con-
sumers can effectively use was tested by operationalizing information
load in terms of number of brands and amount of information per brand
provided. The results of an experiment involving 192 housewives tend to
confirm this hypothesis.
For almost any common grocery product, consumers
shopping in the typical American supermarket are able
to make their selection from among numerous com-
peting brands. Most American supermarkets stock
nearly twenty brands of coffee, thirty brands of beer,
and forty brands of dry breakfast cereal, for example.
The consumer obtains information about brand choice
from a variety of sources such as advertising, word-of-
mouth communications, the package, and private and
public rating services.
One such source, the package, represents the manu-
facturer's final opportunity to inform and persuade the
consumer, and usually contains a wide variety of in-
formation. Much of this appears because the manu-
facturer or seller wants it there. Some package
information is required by law (ingredients, weight,
size), and additional information will probably soon
appear as a function of recent FDA rulings and pending
legislation.
There are at least two perspectives one might adopt
regarding this array of information confronting the
consumer. First, there are those who argue that whether
or not the consumer uses the information, it ought to be
there because the consumer has a moral, ethical, and
legal right to know. As Bymers has stated:
Congress has passed the [Truth-in-Lending Law] on
the issue of the right to know rather than on any
evidence of whether or not the consumer uses the
information. . . . Congress was correct. The use the
consumer makes of information is peripheral to
the main issue of right to know. (Bymers, 1972, p.
59).
It is this very issue of "right to know" which serves as
the foundation for the doctrine of "full and affirmative
disclosure" (cf. Howard & Hulbert, 1973; Jacoby, in
press).
An alternative perspective is held by those members
of the behavioral sciences dealing with human informa-
tion processing (such as Lipowski, 1973; Miller, 1956;
Moray, 1967; Quastler, 1956; Streufert, 1970) and
those dealing with statistical prediction (Wherry, 1931,
1940) and clinical prediction (Bartlett & Green, 1966;
Kelly & Fiske, 1951). Based upon considerable evi-
dence, this position maintains that there are finite limits
to the ability of human beings to assimilate and process
information during any given unit of time, and that
once these limits are surpassed, behavior tends to be-
come confused and dysfunctional. Conceivably, such a
state of information overload can occur in the super-
market. The typical full service American supermarket
displays more than 8,000 different items on its shelves
(Twedt, 1967), most of which are in packages contain-
ing an array of more or less complex information. More-
over, not only is the consumer confronted with numerous
complex alternatives, but the situation is one in which
she usually arrives at a purchase decision within a
relatively short period of time.
If there is indeed a point beyond which additional
information produces dysfunctional consequences, the
ramifications for public policy makers, legislators, and
marketers would be substantial. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, it would generate attention to issues regarding
"how much?" and "just which?" information should be
retained and, once retained, how best to present it to
minimize dysfunctional consequences.
Jacoby, Speller, and Kohn (1974) recently examined
these information overload implications in a consumer
context and found positive linear relationships between
amount of product information and subjective feelings
of satisfaction and certainty, a negative linear relation-
ship with confusion, and a curvilinear (information over-
load) relationship between amount of information and
the accuracy or the "correctness" of the purchase de-
* Jacob Jacoby is Associate Professor and Carol Berning and
Donald Speller are graduate students in the Department of
Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. This study was
supported in part, by a grant from the Consumer Research
Institute, Inc., Washington, D.C.
JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH * Vol. 1 * June 1974
33
This content downloaded from 194.254.129.28 on Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

34 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
cision. However, the ability to select correctly the "best"
brand was demonstrably poorer at both low and high
levels of information load compared to intermediate
levels.
Because of the substantial implications that these
findings have for public policy decisions, replication at-
tempts using different subjects, products, and improved
methods are necessary. The fundamental ways in which
the current study differs from the earlier investigation are
as follows: (1) Housewives rather than students served
as subjects. (2) Rice and prepared dinners were utilized
as the products of interest rather than laundry detergent.
(3) The item of information presented to the subject
was made to conform to the information theoretic defini-
tion of an information "bit," by using dichotomous
information dimensions. (4) Maximum information
load was extended from 72 items to 256 bits. (5) Each
of the variables making up information load (that is,
number-of-brands and bits-of-information-per-brand)
was articulated in terms of four rather than three levels.
(6) Additional, qualitatively superior dependent
measures were introduced. (7) Finally, the current in-
vestigation proceeded beyond the. basic question of
information load to examine how package information
displays can best be organized.
METHOD
Subjects
The subjects were 192 paid housewife volunteers
residing in the greater Lafayette, Indiana community.
Selection procedures insured a socio-demographically
heterogeneous sample in terms of age, education, and
family composition.
Design
A 4 (number-of-brands) X 4 (number-of-bits-of-
information-per-brand) between-subjects analysis of
variance design was employed in which subjects were
randomly assigned to one of sixteen experimental cells
(n = 12 per cell). There were either 4, 8, 12, or 16
brands and either 4, 8, 12, or 16 bits of information per
brand presented to the consumers for each product.
All subjects responded to information regarding two
products: rice and prepared dinners. In order to avoid
providing subjects with ideas regarding the hypotheses
of the study and thereby generating possible demand
characteristics (cf. Orne, 1962), each subject remained
in the same "brand x information bits" treatment con-
dition for both products. The order of product presenta-
tion was counterbalanced for subjects within each cell.
Operationalizing the Independent Variables
Package Information Load. Examination of current
supermarket packages for various brands of rice and
prepared dinners, as well as discussions with knowledge-
able individuals,' revealed that packages for these pro-
ducts often display at least twenty different dimensions2
of information (price, container size, nutritional com-
ponents, storage instruction, etc.). Moreover, most of
these dimensions are relatively complex from an in-
formation theoretic perspective. Assume, for example,
that the actual number of "calories per serving" for a
particular brand of rice was. one of the 128 whole integer
values between 50 and 178 calories. To determine which
specific value is involved (e.g., 98 calories per serving)
can require as many as seven bits of information. Each
information dimension was therefore simplified so that
only a single bit would be required to determine the
specific value involved (e.g., high vs. low calories per
serving; high vs. low cholesterol). Sixteen such relatively
"simple" dichotomous information dimensions were
generated for each of the two products.
The specific information that subjects in each of the
cells received for rice was determined as follows. First,
a 16 (brands) X 16 (bits of information) matrix was
constructed so that the 16 bogus brands, labeled A
through P, appeared as an alphabetically ordered margi-
nal row across the top of the matrix, while the 16 in-
formation dimensions appeared as a marginal column
down the left-hand side. Next, the specific value of
each dimension for each cell was randomly selected
from the two values that each dimension was permitted
to have(such as high vs. low cholesterol content). The
information developed for the 16 X 16 matrix was that
presented to the twelve subjects in the most complex
cell. The specific information arrays for the housewives
in the remaining cells were generated by starting in the
top left-hand corner of the 16 X 16 matrix and then
working across and down until both the appropriate
number of brands and bits of information per brand
were obtained.
The information associated with each "brand" was
placed onto a separate 4" X 6" index card. A different
letter of the alphabet appeared at the top of each card
to identify that "brand." Thus, for example, subjects
in the "8 brands X 12 bits of information" cell each
received 8 index cards, labeled A through H, with twelve
bits of information taken from twelve different informa-
tion dimensions appearing on each card. It should be
noted that providing the product information in such
a manner presents a simpler crossbrand comparison
task for the consumer than would be the case if actual
product packages were utilized.
Mode of Information Organization. In order to study
the effects of "organized vs. disorganized" and "same
vs. different" informational arrays, both the specific
information and the order in which this information
1 Raymond C. Stokes, the Director of the Consumer Research
Institute, was particularly helpful in this regard.
2 To facilitate communication, the following terminology will
be employed throughout. The term "information dimension"
will be used to refer to a basic category of product information
such as price, calories-per-serving, or type of container, while
the term "information value" will refer to the specific points or
forms that information may assume along these dimensions
such as 32?, 64?, and 73? for price, 42, 50, and 70 for calories-
per-serving, and box, tube, plastic bag, or jar for type of con-
tainer. Thus, information dimensions are associated with pro-
ducts, and information values are associated with specfic brands.
This content downloaded from 194.254.129.28 on Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

BRAND CHOICE BEHAVIOR AS FUNCTION OF INFORMATION LOAD 35
appeared varied for products, brands, and subjects,
and reflected the kinds of information arrays now
appearing on supermarket products. For rice, half
the subjects received values from the same information
dimensions in the same order for each brand (Ri),
while the other subjects received the identical informa-
tion presented in a different (scrambled) order for each
brand (R2).
The prepared dinner (PD) information was used to
explore the effect of having the same quantity of in-
formation per brand, but consisting of different dimen-
sions of information for each brand. More specifically,
the information dimensions presented for each brand of
prepared dinners were determined randomly from the
16 available dimr nsions and were presented in random
order. Under these circumstances, the amount of over-
lap across information dimensions utilized for the various
brands in a given cell tended to be low (near the the-
oretical 25 percent level) in the four-bits-of-information-
per-brand cells and increased to 100 percent in the
sixteen-bits-of-information-per-brand cells. The PD con-
dition replicated the manner in which information was
provided to subjects in the earlier Jacoby, Speller and
Kohn (1974) study.
These various information array conditions are here-
after referred to as Rl (same information dimensions
considered in same order for each brand), R2 (same
information dimensions considered in different order for
each brand), and PD (different information dimensions
considered in random order for each brand). Each
subject was placed into a PD cell and either an Rl or
R2 cell, with the number of brands and bits-of-informa-
tion-per-brand she received the same for both products.
Procedure
The housewives were tested in groups of three to
thirty-two. There were two experimenters, one of whom
(E1) remained with the subjects throughout the experi-
ment, while the other (E2) was stationed on an observa-
tion deck behind a one-way mirror. As part of El's
introductory remarks, the housewives were told that the
study "is being funded by the Consumer Research Insti-
tute of Washington, D.C. and the results will most
probably be provided to congressmen working on con-
sumer legislation." Noticeably impressed with this fact,
the housewives were then asked to be as honest and as
accurate as they could be in making their responses.
After supplying basic demographic data, subjects were
told that: "This study is concerned with answering the
following questions: How do people go about deciding
which brand to buy out of the many brands of a product
available on the supermarket shelf?" The subjects were
then asked to pretend that they were in a supermarket
shopping for two products (rice and prepared dinners).
Each housewife was next required to indicate (on a 5
point Likert-type scale) how important each of the
sixteen information dimensions supplied for the first
product was in helping her decide which brand of that
product to buy. Next, each subject indicated what her
"ideal" brand of the product was like by checking one
of two alternative values for each of the sixteen informa-
tion dimensions. These alternatives consisted of the
same bits of information used to develop the simulated
information arrays the subjects later saw during their
shopping trip.
The housewives then began their "shopping" trips. E1
asked the subjects to examine and evaluate all the in-
formation for each of the brands they received. Their
task was to choose that brand which they "liked best."
They were instructed to raise their hands the instant
they had completed this decision task. By referring to a
timer which had been activated the instant all subjects
simultaneously received their information cards, E2 was
able to record the amount of time it took each subject
to reach a decision.
Each subject then went on to complete a set of
subjective state scales and, next, to place all the brands
about which she received information in order of de-
creasing preference to her. After a brief rest period, the
essential procedures were repeated for the second
product.
Finally, the subjects responded to two questions de-
signed to determine whether they had understood the
instructions and had been sincere in performing the
various tasks. This was followed by two open-ended
questions which probed for the existence of possible
demand characteristics and were designed to determine
whether the subjects had guessed the purpose of the
experiment. The subjects were then debriefed and
released.
Operationalizing the Dependent Variable:
Dysfunctional Consequences
Performance Accuracy. The basic operationalization
of dysfunctional consequences was based upon the
ability of the consumer to choose the "best" brand
available to her. Any choice other than the "best" brand
was considered dysfunctional in the sense that it would
not be as capable of satisfying her desires. However, a
problem exists in supplying a universal definition of
"best" in that the combination of product attributes
which makes a brand "best" for one person may not be
the same combination which makes it "best" for a second
person. Even experts frequently cannot agree as to which
combination of attributes is "best, in general." Ac-
cordingly, an idiographic approach was adopted in which
the housewife determined which combination of attri-
butes was "best" for her.
The "best" brand was operationally defined as that
brand of the n brands presented to a given subject which
most closely approximated the profile of the information
values for her "ideal" brand on the dimensions provided
for brands in that cell. Each brand's distance from this
ideal was determined by summing the importance scores
of those dimensions on which the value for the brand in
question did not match that of the "ideal." The brand
with the smallest cumulative score across dimensions
was operationally defined as the brand closest to the
This content downloaded from 194.254.129.28 on Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
ideal, while the brand with the greatest cumulative score
was interpreted to be the most distant from the ideal.
Correctly selecting the brand closest to one's ideal is
hereafter referred to as "Most Preferred Brand (MPB)
Accuracy."
A second operationalization of performance accuracy
consisted of calculating Kendall's coefficient of con-
cordance between each subject's actual preference rank-
ing and the ranking predicted from her description of
her ideal brand. This measure will hereafter be referred
to as "Rank Order Accuracy." The two accuracy mea-
sures are somewhat reflective of March and Simon's
(1958) maximizing and satisficing decision strategies.
- Performance Speed. Garretson and Mauser (1963,
p. 172) contend that the consumer of the future "will
be oriented to buying time rather than product. He will
take the myriad of sophisticated products at his disposal
for granted. His chief concern will be to provide himself
with free time in which he can conveniently use products
that function to conserve time for leisure and pleasure."
In similar fashion, Schary (1971, p. 55) states that:
"Time is an implicit part of every market offering. Prod-
ucts are chosen not only because of price, quality,
features, or even the images created through promotional
activity, but also because of the potential time expendi-
tures that they entail." It may be assumed that time,
itself, is of considerable value and the greater the time
required to reach a decision, the more dysfunctional
the process.
Accordingly, a second indicator of dysfunctional con-
sequences involved measuring the time required to reach
a decision, that is, the total amount of time which elapsed
from the point at which the housewife was first given
the information about each of the brands, to the point
at which she indicated reaching a decision about which
brand she liked best. This span of time was termed
"Total Sequence Time" (TST).
Subjective States. Finally, regardless of time to reach
a decision or ability to select the "best" brand, subjective
states which occur concurrent with and subsequent to
the purchase decision (such as the consumer's feelings
of satisfaction, confusion, certainty with a decision, de-
sire for more information, perceived risk, and so forth)
provide another meaningful basis for evaluating the
effects of information load. As examples, with increasing
information load, accuracy may remain at a fairly con-
stant level while satisfaction increases (for example,
"It was a tough decision, but I feel good because I was
able to handle this complex problem."). Or, especially
at low levels of information load, while accuracy may be
perfect, the consumer may still feel some uncertainty
over the decision and desire more information. Accord-
ingly, the following subjective states were probed: sat-
isfaction; certainty; confusion; likelihood of not having
selected the best buy for the money; likelihood that an
unchosen brand would have been more satisfying; desire
for additional information; likelihood that additional
information would increase certainty and confidence in
the decision; likelihood that additional information
would increase confusion. Three additional questions
probed subjective impressions of percent of information
used, number of brands considered, and number of
dimensions considered. These eleven items are hereafter
collectively referred to as the Subjective State Scales.
RESULTS
A thumbnail socio-demographic sketch of the sub-
jects reveals that the majority (82.3 percent) were cur-
rently married, had no job outside of the home (61.5
percent), and reported being part of families where the
total amount of annual income was less then $10,000
(52.0 percent). The largest group (48.4 percent) re-
ported having no children living at home. The age of
respondents seemed to be distributed almost equally
across six response categories ranging from "24 years
old or younger" to "65 or older." In contrast, the educa-
tional level seemed to be normally distributed across
eight response categories with "high school graduate"
(34.4 percent), "some college" (26.0 percent), and
"college graduate" (17.2 percent), describing most of
the subjects.
Approximately 96 percent reported doing their own
grocery shopping. In general, these women purchased
prepared dinners more frequently than rice, although
only 3.1 percent reported never buying rice while 17.7
percent reported never buying prepared dinners. The
data for quantity of rice and prepared dinners purchased
are about what one would expect to be true for com-
parable American housewives.3
Responses to the ten socio-demographic and shopping
habit items were correlated with the three independent
variables (number-of-brands, number-of-bits-of-inform-
ation-per-brand, and total-amount-of-information) to
determine whether the assignment of subjects to cells
was biased according to any of these items. The only
coefficients exceeding .17 were those between age and
number-of-brands (-.407) and age and total-amount-
of -information (-.326). Thus, a tendency existed for
the older subjects to receive fewer brands and less total
information to evaluate.
Only one of the 192 subjects reported experiencing
difficulty in understanding the instructions and only one
subject reported being less than overwhelmingly sincere
in responding to the questions. Judging from their
written responses to the open-ended questions at the end
of the study and their oral comments during the de-
briefing session, none of the subjects came close to
guessing the purposes of the experiment.
Performance Accuracy
The data regarding performance accuracy (that is,
the ability to select correctly one's "best" brand) will
be considered separately for "Most Preferred Brand
Accuracy" and "Rank Order Accuracy."
MPB Accuracy. Table 1 presents the number of sub-
3 Again, appreciation is acknowledged to Raymond C. Stokes,
a former Senior Vice-President at Comet Rice Mills, Inc., and
Vice-President for Research and Development at Uncle Ben's,
Inc.
This content downloaded from 194.254.129.28 on Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms