Question

What role does the consideration set play in consumer decision making? What is meant by each of the following: universal set, awareness set, consideration set, inert set, and inept set?

Answer 1

A consideration set is a filtered subset of comparable brands that a customer looks at, to make a purchase decision. Role played by consideration set:

• A customer has limited knowledge, ability and information about what he / she wants to buy.
• A customer has limited ability to process the data and information
• A customer doesn't possibly know how to separate the noise from information

A consideration set, which is a filtered set of comparable brands, thus makes the life of a customer easier to evaluate his purchase. He now has to compare, contrast and evaluate a limited data set or data points to make his purchase decision.

Universal set: Is the set of the options that may be considered acceptable for further evaluation prior to purchase decision making.

Awareness set: Is the set of all the options or alternatives the customer is aware of.

Consideration set: We have already defined this above. A consideration set is a filtered subset of comparable brands that a customer looks at, to make a purchase decision.

Inert set: This is the set of all the alternatives that are there in the awareness set, but the customer does not hold strong opinion about them.

and inept set: This is the set of all the alternatives that are there in the awareness set, but the customer doesn't consider them for further comparison, bench-marking, evaluation or decision making.