beanz meanz recognition validity
While much of the debate around heuristics
and biases tends to focus on how mental shortcuts can lead to less than optimal
decision making, it's worth noting that this is not always the case - indeed
fast, simplified decision rules often result in better choices.
Where less knowledge is actually better
than more in order to make a particular inference.
According to Gigerenzer the recognition
heuristic is one such shortcut that we consumers routinely apply without
thinking and derive a kind of counterintuitive less-is-more effect.
Think of this as ‘brand fame’, in it’s
simplest sense.
A 'fame' in which recognised items or brands will be
chosen over unrecognised ones, regardless of any other available relevant
information.
This is important because it gives us a
better clue about how brands are selected in actual real buying situations
versus hypothetical ones.
For instance, when asked to name as many
brands in a specific category as possible, people can rarely name more than a
few.
However when read a list of brands in a
category, people are usually aware of much more than just a few. When prompted they can name loads more.
The problem is that in real-life buying situations the brands that come to mind automatically are the only ones that matter.
So, unaided salience is a slightly better
predictor of the brands that may come to mind in a real buying situation,
though still not perfect.
So, onto Gigerenzer's model of recognition
validity.
On the right-hand side of the diagram above
we see partially ignorant consumers (that's you and me); we have limited brand
name recognition, limited (if any) brand knowledge, but we are in a
goal-oriented situation, getting the weekly shopping in.
On the left is what we are trying to infer
(a quality), in order to determine which beans to buy.
On the top, there are the 'mediators' in
the environment, such as news media, advertising (Beanz Meanz Heinz) , word of
mouth, stuff we've 'heard about', what we did last time and what we've observed
other people do.
The 'quality' (some sort of cue or
whichever attribute we need in order to pick) of a brand can be inferred by how
many associations that we can make, and the quality of those associations.
Over time, we implicitly learn that heavily
advertised brands are of a high quality, and because advertising causes
salience of the brand name, and salience we can infer high quality from
recognition alone.
For the brand itself this is extremely
significant as consumers unconsciously screen out competing brands – they don’t
even get noticed.
But it gets even better when we can learn
by observing what other consumers do (popularity), in turn this also reinforces
recognition.
Then the more times we use a particular
brand the usage itself leads to further recognition.
We still have no more brand knowledge but
don't need it, less knowledge is actually better than more.
In turn, the more often a brand name is
mentioned by the mediator(s) , the more likely it is that a person will have
heard of the name, regardless of its actual quality.
The recognition heuristic is a probably a
very close cousin of what Byron Sharp would call ‘mental availability’.
‘Buyers
use different cues when retrieving brands as buying options.
They
may be totally unaware of the cues they are utilising.
No
consumer is wedded to one attribute all the time.
The
typical buyer might be thinking healthy one time, convenient next time and a
treat the time after. Buyers use different attributes at different points in
time. ‘
How the recognition heuristic works in
short:
- Impact of quality: high-quality objects are
mentioned more often than low-quality objects.
- Impact of publicity: those that are
mentioned more often are recognised more often
- Recognition validity: those that are
recognised more get bought more.
