Consideration Set Measurement

Abstract

The consideration set is a concept that is both intuitively appealing and practically useful. However, there is no standard operational definition of the construct, little reported research investigating alternative measures for empirically assessing the construct, and only limited investigation of interproduct differences in set characteristics (typically focusing on set size). Results of the experiment reported here indicate that situation-specific operational definitions yield smaller reported consideration sets that exhibit greater correspondence to reported purchases than do situation-neutral definitions, and that semantic variations within definition type have little impact on measured set characteristics. Further, findings indicate that much of the interproduct variation in consideration set size is related to awareness set size.