Overload Confusion Proneness: The Underlying Cognitive Vulnerabilities and Their Decision Moderations through Various Risk Reduction Strategies in High Involvement Personal Care Category

Abstract

In today’s competitive environment, consumers are being increasingly exposed to a plethora of products and an enormous amount of marketing communications. Also, a lot of these products and communications exhibit a baffling amount of similarity. This increased clutter and similarity has resulted in the ever-increasing amount of consumer confusion in different markets. Through the present research, the problem of consumer confusion owing to the product similarity and clutter has been investigated in the Indian face wash market using a sample size of 150, with the emphasis on the risk reduction strategies utilised by the same when confused. For this purpose, a scale was developed and validated; following which it was utilised for the study of overload confusion proneness in the face wash market. Using the formulated hypotheses, the decision moderations in case of high perceived risk was studied and discussed in the Indian face wash market.