Measuring Consideration Sets through Recall or Recognition: A Comparative Study

Marketing researchers have studied consideration sets for a long time and many different operationalizations of this concept have been used. This empirical study, with 670 households, compares two widely used operationalizations, recognition-based and recall- based measures of consideration sets. The results indicate several differences between the measures. The recognition-based measure produces larger sets than the recall-based measure. However, some strong brands are found to be included more often with the recall-based measure. Further, the recognition-based measure generates increased price sensitivity as well as reduced loyalty as compared to a recall-based measure.