Literature Review of Heuristics - Literature Review of Heuristics

Introduction

At the field of marketing, many marketers prefer to use heuristics as a powerful tool that arouse consumer’s desire and change their attitude. Heuristics have brought great influence on consumer behavior. As a result, many scholars pay more attention to analyze how consumers relay on heuristic to make a decision and how heuristic can be used as a powerful device by marketers. This essay will firstly review some previous academic research about heuristic and then describe how some types of heuristics are implicated to effect buyers decision-marketing and finally develop a print advertisement about Starbucks.

Literature review of heuristics

From the psychology discipline, Gigerenzer (as cited in Merlo, Lukas, Whitwell, 2008) point out that ‘serving to find out or discover’ is the original meaning of ‘Heuristic’ in Geek. Today, Heuristics has becomes a catch-all term for explaining decision processes (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008). Kahneman and Frederick (2002) have recently suggested that “heuristics are mental shortcuts used when people are interested in assessing a ‘target attribute’ and when they substitute a ‘heuristic attribute’ of the object, which is easier to handle”. At the earlier research, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) discussed three classic heuristics: availability, representativeness, and anchoring. They defined the representativeness heuristic as “evaluation of the probability of an uncertain event, or sample, by the degree to which is similar in essential properties to a parent population, or reflects the process by which it is generated” (Wickham, 2003, P. 158). Based on results of many studies, Harvey（2007, p.17）defined anchoring heuristic as that “people use the last data point in the series as a mental anchor and then adjust away from that anchor to take account of the major feature(s) of the series”. In addition to these classic heuristics, affect heuristic is one of important heuristic that influence people make sample decision. Affect heuristic are defined as people estimate an object or event in their minds are influence by various degree with affects (Finucaine et al., 2000).

In marketing discipline, heuristic has been widely used in advertising campaigns to influence consumer behavior. Merlo, Lukas and Whitwell (2008, p.190) point out that consumer behavior is one of main area where marketing discipline use heuristics theories. In marketing and advertising activities, heuristics are more used to influence consumer’s sample decision-making. According Hoyer and Macinnis (2008, p, 247), heuristics usually are used in low-effort judgment processes, because when consumer show low motivation, ability and opportunity to process information, they more likely to make a quickly and sample decision by their experience, perception or preference. Sheth, Mittal and Newman (1999, p527) point out that