Itamar Simonson | |
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Born | |
Nationality | U.S. and Israel |
Academic background | |
Doctoral advisor | James Bettman |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Consumer research,decision making,marketing |
Institutions | Stanford Graduate School of Business |
Itamar Simonson is a professor of marketing,holding the Sebastian S. Kresge Chair of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business,Stanford University. He is known for his work on the factors that determine the choices that buyers make. His academic career started at the University of California at Berkeley,where he taught for six years,before he moved to Stanford. Many of his former PhD students (such as Ravi Dhar,Ziv Carmon,Stephen Nowlis,Aimee Drolet,and Ran Kivetz to name a few) hold senior positions at some of the best universities in the world.
He received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the Hebrew University in 1976,his MBA from the UCLA School of Management in 1978 and his PhD in Marketing from Duke University in 1987.
Simonson has studied both preferences that are created "on the fly" when people make choices and predetermined preference elements that reflect people's habits,predispositions,and genes. He began studying consumer choice in 1987. Simonson's doctoral dissertation introduced the notion that consumers select the options that are supported by the best reasons or justifications,rather than the options that maximize utility. He demonstrated the "compromise effect",whereby consumers often select the middle or,alternatively,an "extreme" option in a set regardless of its real values. [1] Consumers often rely on a comparison with the options they encounter,and "compromise" because it is the easiest to justify and least likely to be criticized. [2] He also showed how consumers use irrelevant product features to determine an option's attractiveness. For example,offering consumers a product "bonus" (e.g.,getting the option to pay for a collector's plate when buying a product) that many regard as unneeded leads consumers to reject that brand and prefer a competing option. [2]
Simonson also demonstrated that the mere fact that consumers buy multiple products at the same time (e.g.,several cartons of yogurt for several days) causes them to choose more variety than they would have selected had they bought just one product each time. [3]
Anticipating the possibility of regret tends to lead consumers to buy a product that is on "sale" now instead of waiting for a better "sale" later,and to choose a well-known,expensive brand over a lesser-known,less expensive brand. When making risky choices,anticipating regret leads to the opposite effect than anticipating responsibility or blame.
Kivetz and Simonson showed that people tend to put too much weight when making choices on product aspects that fit them better than others,referred to as the "Idiosyncratic Fit Heuristic." They demonstrated the implications of this tendency (or heuristic) with respect to participation in loyalty programs and the evaluation of other offers and opportunities.
Dhar and Simonson examined conditions that lead consumers to either "go all the way" (e.g.,buy a tasty but unhealthy entree and also tasty but unhealthy dessert),referred to as highlighting,versus trying to balance things out (e.g.,on a particular trip,flying first class but taking an inexpensive shuttle bus to the airport). Nowlis and Simonson examined the different consumer preferences that emerge from rating of individual options as opposed to choosing between options.
As Ofir and Simonson showed,telling customers before a service encounter or a shopping experience that they would later be asked to evaluate that experience causes them to be less satisfied,and customers who state their expectations from a service before the experience are also less satisfied.
Simonson has argued that it is meaningful to assume that consumers have dormant preferences for product configurations even before the products embedding those preferences exist. For example,consumers may have a dormant preference for a licorice candy even before ever trying such a candy and they might have a preference for a videogame system using a motion-sensitive remote even before such a game system was invented. The ultimate inherent preferences are those that are largely heritable. In particular,initial evidence obtained by Simonson and Sela indicates that many consumer preferences (e.g.,for compromise options,pleasurable versus useful products,chocolate,jazz,science fiction movies,and hybrid cars) are significantly heritable.
Simonson has received many awards for his research,including Honorary Doctorate:University of Paris II –Sorbonne Universities,awards for the best article published in the Journal of Marketing Research, [4] Journal of Consumer Research, [5] Journal of Public Policy &Marketing, [6] as well as awards from the Association of Consumer Research,American Marketing Association,and the Society for Consumer Psychology. Notably,he was named a fellow of the Association for Consumer Research in 2013. [7]
Marketing is the process of identifying customers and "creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging" goods and services for the satisfaction and retention of those customers. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce.
Brand equity, in marketing, is the worth of a brand in and of itself – i.e., the social value of a well-known brand name. The owner of a well-known brand name can generate more revenue simply from brand recognition, as consumers perceive the products of well-known brands as better than those of lesser-known brands.
In economics and marketing, product differentiation is the process of distinguishing a product or service from others to make it more attractive to a particular target market. This involves differentiating it from competitors' products as well as from a firm's other products. The concept was proposed by Edward Chamberlin in his 1933 book, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition.
Conjoint analysis is a survey-based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people value different attributes that make up an individual product or service.
Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. Consumer behaviour consists of how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, marketing, and economics.
As part of consumer behavior, the buying decision process is the decision-making process used by consumers regarding the market transactions before, during, and after the purchase of a good or service. It can be seen as a particular form of a cost–benefit analysis in the presence of multiple alternatives.
A lifestyle brand is a brand that attempts to embody the values, aspirations, interests, attitudes, or opinions of a group or a culture for marketing purposes. Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of making their products contribute to the definition of the consumer's way of life. As such, they are closely associated with the advertising and other promotions used to gain mind share in their target market. They often operate from an ideology, hoping to attract a relatively high number of people and ultimately become a recognised social phenomenon.
Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.
Food marketing brings together the food producer and the consumer through a chain of marketing activities.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
In psychology, a heuristic is an easy-to-compute procedure or rule of thumb that people use when forming beliefs, judgments or decisions. The familiarity heuristic was developed based on the discovery of the availability heuristic by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it happens when the familiar is favored over novel places, people, or things. The familiarity heuristic can be applied to various situations that individuals experience in day-to-day life. When these situations appear similar to previous situations, especially if the individuals are experiencing a high cognitive load, they may regress to the state of mind in which they have felt or behaved before. This heuristic is useful in most situations and can be applied to many fields of knowledge; however, there are both positives and negatives to this heuristic as well.
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model. Brand awareness is a key consideration in consumer behavior, advertising management, and brand management. The consumer's ability to recognize or recall a brand is central to purchasing decision-making. Purchasing cannot proceed unless a consumer is first aware of a product category and a brand within that category. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but they must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for purchasing to proceed. Creating brand awareness is the main step in advertising a new product or bringing back the older brand in light.
Naïve diversification is a choice heuristic. Essentially, when asked to make several choices at once, people tend to diversify more than when making the same type of decision sequentially. Its first demonstration was made by Itamar Simonson in marketing in the context of consumption decisions by individuals. It was subsequently shown in the context of economic and financial decisions.
Heuristics is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are most likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability.
A context effect is an aspect of cognitive psychology that describes the influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus. The impact of context effects is considered to be part of top-down design. The concept is supported by the theoretical approach to perception known as constructive perception. Context effects can impact our daily lives in many ways such as word recognition, learning abilities, memory, and object recognition. It can have an extensive effect on marketing and consumer decisions. For example, research has shown that the comfort level of the floor that shoppers are standing on while reviewing products can affect their assessments of product's quality, leading to higher assessments if the floor is comfortable and lower ratings if it is uncomfortable. Because of effects such as this, context effects are currently studied predominantly in marketing.
The default effect, a concept within the study of nudge theory, explains the tendency for an agent to generally accept the default option in a strategic interaction. The default option is the course of action that the agent, or chooser, will obtain if he or she does not specify a particular course of action. The default effect has broad applications for firms attempting to 'nudge' their customers in the direction of the firm's optimal outcome. Experiments and observational studies show that making an option a default increases the likelihood that such an option is chosen. There are two broad classes of defaults: mass defaults and personalised defaults. Setting or changing defaults has been proposed and applied by firms as an effective way of influencing behaviour—for example, with respect to setting air-conditioner temperature settings, giving consent to receive e-mail marketing, or automatic subscription renewals.
Journal of Marketing Research is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Marketing Association. It was established in 1964 and covers all aspects of marketing research. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 5.000. The founding editor was Robert Ferber.
Ziv Carmon is the Dean of Research, Professor of Business Administration, and holder of The Alfred H. Heineken Chaired Professorship at INSEAD. An expert in human judgment and decision-making, he is best known for his research on placebo effects of commercial actions and on the endowment effect, and his presentations and teachings about Customer Insight.
Russell Stuart Winer is an American econometrician and academic administrator. He is the William Joyce Professor of Marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business and dean of the department of business administration at the University of the People.
Consideration set is a model used in consumer behaviour to represent all of the brands and products a consumer evaluates before making a final purchase decision. The term consideration set was first used in 1977 by Peter Wright and Fredrick Barbour. The consideration set is a subset of the awareness set, which is all of the brands and products a consumer initially thinks of when faced with a purchasing decision. The awareness set is filtered into the consideration set through the consumer's individual thoughts, preferences, and feelings – such as price, mood, previous experiences, and heuristics. Conversely, products that do not meet the criteria for the consideration set are either placed into the inert set or the inept set. These sets are fluid and the products in each set can change rapidly when the consumer is presented with new information.