Using the Comparative Judgment Task in Consumer Research: An Illustrative Study

Understanding how consumers represent product information in memory has been of interest to researchers in consumer behavior. Several techniques such as MDS and direct scaling have been used to map the representation of a product in consumer memory. This paper suggests the use of the comparative judgment task researched in cognitive psychology to study magnitude representations in consumer memory. Although comparative judgments have been studied in psychology, similar research on product dimensions has not been conducted in consumer research. Details of an experiment conducted to demonstrate the use of comparative judgments in marketing are reported followed by a discussion of extensions to consumer research.