Effectiveness of Marketing Cues on Consumer Perceptions of Quality: The Moderating Roles of Brand Reputation and Third-Party Information

Consumers usually infer unobservable product quality by processing multiple-quality cues in the environment. Prior research considering the simultaneous effects of marketing cues on consumer quality perceptions is sparse. Despite the growing importance of third-party information, research examining its simultaneous effects with marketing cues on consumers decision making is especially absent. This research, drawing on cue-diagnosticity, cue-consistency, and negativity bias theories, proposes and tests a conceptual framework to reveal interplays among various marketing- and nonmarketing-controlled product cues. The first study examines how two- and three-way interactions of high-scope (i.e., brand reputation) and low-scope marketing cues (i.e., price and warranty) affect consumer perceptions. The second study examines a set of interaction effects between third-party quality ratings and marketing cues (i.e., price and warranty) on consumers perceptions. Overall, the results reveal theoretical and managerial implications for processing multiple-quality cues in consumers inference-making behaviors and suggest that consumers generally aggregate perceptions in more complex ways than suggested in the prior literature when making global product quality evaluations.