– The purpose of this paper is to explore the manner in which the rate of product consumption contributes to the formation and strengthening of the price-quality heuristic.
– The research included a literature review with a series of tests across a sequence of blind and sighted tasting experiments involving 278 subjects assessing seven differently priced products of orange juice, coffee and wine.
– The paper found evidence that consumption rates do affect the way consumers respond to price information and that sight-based “System 1” judgement errors accrue and increase progressively with consumption. This relationship was observed to be stronger in sight-based product assessments for consumption of four or more units per week compared to those consuming one unit per week. For blind-based product assessments, an inverse relationship between price affect and consumption was observed, with affect reported to be stronger for minimal rates of consumption.
– The observation of sight-based and blind-based affect relationships which are dependent on the levels of product consumption appears to be an interesting advancement in consumer behaviour research. This provides support for a dual structure of rationality operated by an interconnection between “System 1” sight-based associations and “System 2” blind-based ponderous thinking. The paper further provides support for Kahneman’s “conflation of intuition” as classically conditioned memory.
