Demographic characteristics of consumers who find it difficult to decide

Purpose – The puropse of this article is to identify consumers who experience difficulty in making their buying decisions, especially in the face of variety of choice, proliferation of brand choice, small inter‐brand differences, brand counterfeiting, marketing communication overload and so on. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire administered to 264 consumers in north Germany used a scale developed by the authors at the University of Hanover in 2002 to measure three types of difficulty in marketplace decision making. Those relate to similarity among product‐service offerings available, information overload, and marketing communications that lack clarity. Data collected were analysed by ANOVA and hierarchical cluster analysis. Findings – ANOVA suggested that high levels of marketplace decision difficulty were characteristic of older, less well‐educated female consumers. Subsequent cluster analysis identified four distinct and meaningful consumer types, in terms of “marketplace decision difficulty” or MPDD. Research limitations/implications – The present study was restricted to a single large city in one European country, and one of the test statistics was perhaps too rigorous for useful conclusions in the case of some variables, but the findings do contain clear managerial implications and future research developments are proposed. Practical implications – Marketing strategists should find it useful to understand the demographics of consumers who are likely to experience difficulty in making marketplace decisions – for instance, to segment audiences for their marketing communications, and to vary style and content accordingly. Originality/value – This study offers a practical market segmentation scheme, based on demographic influences on decision‐making behaviour.