Identifying the Picky Shopper

Abstract

Shopper pickiness is an individual difference that is fundamentally associated with how individuals make choices. From lay intuition, we all know someone who is “picky”. Yet to date, research in marketing has neither systematically defined the construct nor provided the means by which to assess relative degrees of pickiness among shoppers. This paper theorizes that individual differences in shopper pickiness are characterized by two primary factors: precise preferences (PP) and flaw sensitivity (FS). The authors develop the Picky Shopper scale and find that pickier shoppers describe their ideal products in more detail, are more critical of advertised products, are less susceptible to social influence, are more likely to spread negative word of mouth, and form smaller consideration sets. In addition, the authors find that picky shoppers care about a wide range of attributes when they make selections, even when deciding on horizontal attributes (e.g. color, taste). Finally, the Picky Shopper scale reliably identifies pickiness across various shopping contexts.