A Typology of Individual Search Strategies Among Purchasers of New Automobiles

Cluster analysis of questionnaire data was used to identify six distinctive external information search patterns among purchasers of new automobiles. Two of the shopper clusters had not been clearly specified in prior research-namely, an advisor-assisted shopper group and a highly self-reliant shopper group. An effort to cross-validate the typology using data obtained from automobile sales person-nel was partially successful. It is hypothesized that these strategies are reflections of heuristic decision processes which reflect both individual difference character-istics and the purchase situation. Previous research on consumer behavior has found that consumers employ information search strategies which can be distinguished by the amount of external search effort and decision time. Early efforts to identify distinct groups of consumers characterized by differing information search strategies used unidimensional measures of aggregate search activity (Katona and Mueller 1955, Newman and Staelin 1972). Such aggregate measures have been criti-cized for failing to adequately define differences in patterns of information gathering (Claxton, Fry, and Portis 1974). Very different patterns of search activity may produce sim-ilar aggregate search measures, with the result that poten-tially important differences in search activity may be missed.