Developing Heuristic-Based Quality Judgements: Attention Blocking in Consumer Choice

Through a series of experiments we illustrate how the sequential order in which consumers receive information can influence the way this information is processed and affect consumers’ decisions. Specifically, when participants initially receive information regarding brand/quality or price/quality associations, these associations can block consumers’ attention to more relevant quality-determining physical attributes. Moreover, this process of attention blocking can carry-over to affect quality judgements pertaining to similarly branded or priced products beyond the product in which blocking was initiated. This implies that consumers judgements of quality may be heavily dependent on “first impressions” which develop into brand and price heuristics.