Startups and small businesses face a massive challenge when it comes to getting considered by their target audiences. First, you need to capture attention which is no easy feat. Only then can you hope to make it to consideration, and ultimately, purchase.
You can think of it like a funnel. Out of all the available options, only a fraction will make it into the attention bucket. That may still leave many, but only a handful will then make it to the consideration set — from which consumers make a purchase decision.
In this article, we will focus on the middle part: consideration. After reading this article, you will understand what a consideration set is and how large they tend to be.
Defining the consideration set
The consideration set is an important concept that happens in the evaluation stage of the consumer decision making process. Specifically, the consideration set refers to the limited set of brands or products that a consumer actively considers when making a purchase decision within a specific product category.
It’s a collection of options that have the ability to satisfy the consumers’ goal and are salient and accessible in a given situation. For example, when a consumer decides to purchase a new smartphone, they may dig prominent brands such as Apple and Samsung out from memory and pair them with new alternatives found through research. The consumer may be motivated to be as cost-effective as possible and discover alternatives such as Xiaomi and Oppo, resulting in a consideration set of four brands.
The consideration set is like a shortlist of products or brands that customers think about when they’re deciding what to buy. Imagine you’re craving a pizza and you think of three nearby pizza places. Those three places are your “consideration set” for that decision. As a business, you want to be on that shortlist in your product category.
How large is the consideration set?
How many brands make it into the consideration set depends on many things. A prominent factor is how high involvement the purchase decision is. High involvement is likely to lead to more brands in the consideration set and vice versa. A low involvement decision may even include as few as a single brand in certain circumstances.
There is, however, also a limit to how much information search a consumer can do. No matter how high involvement the decision at hand is, the consumer is always impaired by limited cognitive abilities. Therefore it’s not only a tradeoff between which alternatives to consider, but also which features of the alternatives to focus on. There is no universal law at play here, meaning you must do your own research to understand the precise consideration set dynamics in your situation.
Luckily though, existing research gives us a rough baseline to work with.
Low involvement consideration set size
The low involvement data comes from a study of the French beverage market.1Philippe, Aurier & Jean, S. & Zaichkowsky, Judith. (2000). Consideration set size and familiarity with usage context. Advances in Consumer Research. 27. 307-313. Researchers prompted consumers with 12 usage situations and asked them to indicate all the brands they would consume in each. Consumers were also prompted with 16 product so that recall would not be unaided. In total, this created 4956 choice scenarios.
44% of the scenarios had only one item in their consideration set while 72% had 2 or less. In total the mean consideration set size was 2.1. The studies also reveals evidence that in social situations (e.g., what beverage to have during a meal with friends) the consideration set slightly increases. Though these figures are in line with what we would expect based on what we know about low and high involvement decisions, I’d advise you to not take this as some universal law. Rather, consider it a handy quantitative benchmark.
High involvement consideration set size
High involvement is available for a recent study of TV consideration sets.2Ringel, D. M., & Skiera, B. (2016). Visualizing Asymmetric Competition Among More Than 1,000 Products Using Big Search Data. Marketing Science, 35(3), 511–534. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2015.0950 The researchers constructed 105,606 consideration sets in total by analyzing consumer clickstream data with regards to products he/she searched for and compared online.
They found the mean consideration set to equal 3.19 products. The most common (roughly 50% of all consideration sets) and smallest consideration sets included only 2 items but the largest included 16, but were extremely rare. Approximately 19% of consideration sets included 3 items, 9.5% included 4 items, 6% included 5 items and about 4% or so included 6 items.
Takeaways
Taken together, we can use 2-6 as a rule of thumb for the average consideration set size. However, it’s important to remember that the precise figures will always depend on the individual context.
Another thing to note is that I would always err on the smaller side. These studies above both cited their finding in terms of averages but what we are really interested in are the medians. I.e., the distribution. It is more actionable for us to know that say 75% of our customers only consider 3 brands when buying within the category than that the average consideration is 3.6 brands.
Hence, the better rule of thumb may be that most consideration sets include only 1-3 alternatives.
Conclusion
The consideration set represents the limited set of brands or products that consumers actively consider during their decision-making process. People have limited cognitive abilities meaning that most consideration sets include only 1-3 brands, though ultimately this depends on each context.
Small brands are disadvantaged against deep-pocketed corporations who have larger marketing budgets to buy mental availability. Marketers working at these smaller firms need to be creative and and systematic to increase their chances of making it into consideration sets. I’ll cover that in a later article.
References
- 1Philippe, Aurier & Jean, S. & Zaichkowsky, Judith. (2000). Consideration set size and familiarity with usage context. Advances in Consumer Research. 27. 307-313.
- 2Ringel, D. M., & Skiera, B. (2016). Visualizing Asymmetric Competition Among More Than 1,000 Products Using Big Search Data. Marketing Science, 35(3), 511–534. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2015.0950
