The Influence of Cognitive Style on Consumers′ Variety Seeking among Food Innovations Available to Purchase

Recent research has shown that personality traits such as sensation seeking, and product‐induced effects such as evocation of involvement,influence variety seeking by food consumers. Considers the additional factor of consumers′ early purchasing of new food brands/products. Three studies highlight the relationships between patterns of initial consumers′ purchasing both of general and “healthy” food innovations and their consumers′ cognitive styles. The findings generally corroborate other research but show that sensation seeking and other traits often associated with early adoption are not, in fact,linearly related to variety seeking. In particular, consumers who show the greatest level of variety seeking are those who score low on these“innovative” traits but are highly involved with the product field, i.e. personally interested in and likely to think a great deal about it.