Mapping Consumer Mental Processes and Representations Across Diverse Marketplaces

With the constant innovations in today's marketplaces, consumers engage in increasingly diverse and complex interactions with products, brands, and firms. How consumers behave in these interactions is ultimately governed by the mental processes and representations in their minds, a longstanding notion that dates back to the early times of the field of consumer research. With the ever-evolving marketplaces where consumers need to process and represent unprecedented amounts of information, there is a growing need for direct and precise measurement of relevant processes and representations, which remains challenging for traditional behavioral methods. Collectively, these papers demonstrate the unique value of measuring processes and representations, on top of what traditional methods relying on behavioral data alone can otter. They also illustrate a number of complementary methodological approaches tailored to the research question at hand. Furthermore, they share the common focus on realistic experimental paradigms that seek to simulate real-world consumer experiences, which adds to the translational appeal of the findings to inform managerial and policy decisions.