Category Representation and Category-Based Inference

To make sense of the myriad new and existing products and services in the marketplace, consum­ ers construct and use categorical representations to classify, interpret, and understand information they receive about these products and services. We define a consumer category as a set of products, services, brands, or other marketing entities, states, or events that appear, to the consumer, related in some way. We define a categorical representation as information that becomes stored in the cognitive system for a consumer category, and that is later used to process it.! One important use of category representations is during categorization, when consumers use these representations to assign a particular product or service to a consumer category, so that they can understand and draw inferences about it. Consumers might classify a new product as an MP3 player on the basis of prior knowledge about physical or functional features of MP3 players, for example, that MP3 play­ ers store music efficiently, are small in size, and are rectangular in shape. Once the new product is categorized, prior categorical information about MP3 players may also be used to make inferences about unknown attributes or features of the new product, or to form an evaluation of the new product. From a marketing perspective, a number of questions about categorization have been examined that have implications for marketing decision making. For example, how should a new product be