Why does a better, cheaper product lose to a known brand? Understand the psychology of the consideration set.
When someone opens a food delivery app, the screen shows many biryani restaurants near their home. No one scrolls through every name or reads every menu, because that takes too much time and energy.
Instead, they check the prices at three specific places they already know and trust. Those three chosen restaurants make up their consideration set. If a new local restaurant is not in that consideration set, it will never get the order, even if it sells better food at a lower price.
Why Being In the Consideration Set Matters
When an Indian family decides to buy a new scooter, they have dozens of options in the market. But a father buying one for his daughter does not visit ten different showrooms across the city. He only talks about a few brands like the Honda Activa, the TVS Jupiter, and maybe the Suzuki Access.
These three names make up his consideration set. He will visit these exact showrooms, ask about the mileage, take test drives, and buy the best one among them. The other companies simply do not exist in his mind even for consideration. For a brand, being famous is not enough. The real goal is to enter the buyer’s consideration set right when they are ready to spend their money.
People have very little patience when making everyday choices. When a shopper goes to a supermarket to buy something basic, like toothpaste, they do not think much about it. They see fifty colourful boxes on the shelf. However, they only really look at Colgate and Pepsodent.
Also read: How Information Asymmetry Affects Buying Behaviour
Shoppers do this just to save time and effort. A normal person does not want to stand there and read the ingredients on the back of different boxes. If a new herbal toothpaste wants to enter this consideration set, it cannot just place a beautiful box on the shelf. It has to remind the buyer of its name long before they even step inside the shop.
The same rule applies to expensive electronics. When someone decides to buy a new television for their home, they do not read reviews for every brand online. Instead, they usually narrow the list to just a few brands already in their consideration set.
They feel safe choosing from this short list because they trust the service centers. A cheaper brand might offer better specifications like a bigger screen or even better sound, but if it is not in this consideration set, it loses the sale completely. The buyer simply assumes the unfamiliar brand has poor quality and moves on to the next option.
A company can easily lose regular buyers if it stops paying attention to them. Suppose someone always buys a certain brand of running shoes. That brand sits securely in their consideration set. But if the stitching quality drops or the price suddenly rises, the buyer will quietly remove the brand from the list and start checking rival shoe companies instead.
Once a brand drops out of a consideration set, it takes twice the effort to get back into that consideration set.
Companies often waste too much money trying to appeal to everyone in the market. Smart businesses focus on becoming one of the top three names a person remembers.
A brand does not need to beat all the other companies. It only needs to be better than the two other names in the buyer’s head. Keeping a place in that consideration set guarantees steady sales.
–Written by Rajnish Singh, a copywriter and strategist with a background in fast-paced journalism, who explores the gap between what brands promise and how consumers actually behave.
