Cognitive Dissonance and the Classification of Consumer Goods

The theory of cognitive dissonance is one of the recently developed tools that marketing has borrowed from the behavioral sciences to investigate consumer behavior. The classification of goods into convenience, shopping, and specialty categories, on the other hand, is among the most venerable ideas in marketing literature. This article merges the two by using the theory of cognitive dissonance to give a new dimension to the classification of consumer goods. The result is a fresh set of behavioral criteria for classifying goods.