Product Familiarity and the Expression of Preferences

Marketers often base decisions about marketing strategies on the results of research designed to elicit information about consumers' preferences. A large body of research indicates, however, that preferences often are labile. That is, preferences can be reversed depending on factors such as how the preference is elicited. In three studies, we examine the effect of familiarity in two preference-elicitation tasks, choice and matching judgments. We provide evidence of an interaction between familiarity and response mode (choice or matching) in each study. In study 3, we test the explanation that preference reversals may occur when the interaction of response mode with product-category familiarity leads to systematic changes in attribute weighting