Consumers' internal categorization structures: an additive tree analysis

Purpose – The mere presence of categories, irrespective of their content, positively influences the satisfaction of choosers who are unfamiliar with the choice domains. In the present research the main goal is to analyze how a complex product category is categorized internally by consumers, with and without price information available, and explore the effect of product involvement and category knowledge on such structures within the wine category. Design/methodology/approach – Additive tree analysis allows us to visualize the perceptual structure of complex sets of alternatives and the multinomial logit model enables us to analyze the influence of these inherent personal characteristics. Findings – The results show that consumers organize information on red wines and rosés according to a “type→origin” cognitive construct and use “price”, if available, as a third attribute. Consumers comparing red wines and white wines organize the available information according to a “type” construct in which “price”, even if available, plays no role. Subjects with a greater knowledge of the category exhibit more complex structures. Research limitations/implications – A broader database would be necessary to draw further conclusions with respect to the specific category of wine. Another possible limitation may arise from the chosen set of alternatives. There are more red wines among the stimuli for the survey. As a result of this numerical imbalance between the red wines on the one hand and the rosé/white wines on the other, the red are perceived to be more similar to each other. It would therefore be useful in future research to try to obtain the same number of alternatives for each attribute level. Meanwhile, research on other product categories would be useful to provide further validation of these findings. Practical implications – The main implication of the authors' findings for retailers is that an understanding of the internal categorization structures underlying consumers' product similarity judgments will enable them to organize their shelf space layout to match the way it is processed by consumers. Furthermore, the findings suggest that high‐knowledge consumers may be selectively targeted by using store layouts arranged on the basis of complex structures, while low‐knowledge consumers may be selectively targeted using store layouts organized on the basis of simple structures. Originality/value – The main contribution of this paper to the existing literature on perceptual organization is an analysis of the influence of price on respondents' internal categorization structures, when price is considered a key variable in the formation of consumers' impressions of a product. Furthermore, in the novel context of the wine category, the authors describe the moderating effect of two variables, involvement and knowledge, on the results of previous literature on perceptual organization. These two variables have potential as segmentation criteria to enable category managers to tailor their products to target markets. Secondly, though no less importantly, the authors accompany the qualitative additive tree methodology used to derive the perceived structures with an analysis of variance to achieve a more objective interpretation of the additive trees.