Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Decision Making
When we make decisions about anything from buying an item to even deciding what we are wearing, we use heuristics. These are little mental short cuts that we use in decision making. There are many different heuristics that we use, even when making one decision we will use more than one sometimes. The brand recognition, the attribute recognition, and even take the last decision can be used when making one decision. For instance you could go to a store and need a new DVD player, so you first look at the one you replaced, why do you have to replace it? Was it a good brand name? Did it last a long time? So after thinking about what you "took the last time", you go for the attribute. Does this new DVD player have the capability to do blue-ray, or does it have recognized memory where it begins where you turn the player off at? When looking at these you will find some products that may have everything you need, so the last thing you may look at is the brand name. The brand name is something many may look at first but I don't even look at the brand names most of the time. The one thing that I know I look at before looking at anything else s the price. In class on Monday we didn't go over anymore of the heuristics, but I feel this may be the most important thing people look at this time when the economy is down. So my question is what exactly do you go to a store to look for first, how much it will cost you or what brand made it?
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A lot of my decision making when purchasing in grocery and retails stores is placed on the price of the product. Admittedly, I do a majority of my shopping in "brand name" stores- such as Abercrombie and American Eagle. However, who doesn't want to find a great bargain?! The heuristics we engage in daily are so intuitive that we typically do not even recognize that we are engaging in that thought process. It will be interesting in class to find out in more detail what possesses us to make the decisions we make.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about price being one of the first things I look for when I go to a store to perchase something. I don't have the money to be looking for the best brands because of being in school and not having a job so I am going to try to find the best deal that I can. Out of the 3 heuristics mentioned in class the one that I use the most is the last decision. When I purchase something I remember it if it's something that I really liked and if I'm going to buy it again. Like Lindsey said we all use heuristics although we might not notice it so I am kind of interested to see how I use the others the next time I go to purchase something.
ReplyDeleteI'm almost positive that I use the last decision method. If I use a product once, and I really like the results it gave me, even if it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be, sometimes I feel as though I don't want to waste the time finding something else, or spending additional money on something that may not work as well. The thing that comes to mind right away is hair gel. The gel I currently use isn't the greatest, but it gets the job done,and it's not expensive, which is also VERY important on the college student budget. I think that most times, it is difficult to narrow the heuristic you use down to just one.
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