Understanding consumer usage of product magnitudes through sorting tasks

Magnitudes describing product attributes are basic elements used in decisio n making. Although several researchers have emphasized the need to understa nd how consumers categorize product attributes, empirical research on this issue is rare. As a first step in developing and evaluating methodologies t o examine this issue, a sorting task methodology is introduced to study thi s problem. Hypotheses were generated to address important theoretical issue s relating to how consumers use magnitudes describing product attributes an d tested in two studies. The results suggest that the number of magnitudes used by consumers to think about product attributes (i) is higher for abstr act when compared to concrete attributes, and (ii) is positively related to the number of magnitudes used in an overall evaluation of liking. Results also provided evidence to support the use of the sorting method. (C) 1999 J ohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.