Visual Representation: Implications for Decision Making
- 1 January 2007
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Marketing
- Vol. 71 (1), 160-177
- https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.71.1.160
Abstract
A large number of visualization tools have been created to help decision makers understand increasingly rich databases of product, customer, sales force, and other types of marketing information. This article presents a framework for thinking about how visual representations are likely to affect the decision processes or tasks that marketing managers and consumers commonly face, particularly those that involve the analysis or synthesis of substantial amounts of data. From this framework, the authors derive a set of testable propositions that serve as an agenda for further research. Although visual representations are likely to improve marketing manager efficiency, offer new insights, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, they may also bias decisions by focusing attention on a limited set of alternatives, increasing the salience and evaluability of less diagnostic information, and encouraging inaccurate comparisons. Given this, marketing managers are advised to subject insights from visual representations to more formal analysis.Keywords
This publication has 105 references indexed in Scilit:
- Information Processing at Successive Stages of Decision Making: Need for Cognition and Inclusion–Exclusion EffectsOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2000
- The Evaluability Hypothesis: An Explanation for Preference Reversals between Joint and Separate Evaluations of AlternativesOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1996
- EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK COMPLEXITY ON DYNAMIC DECISION-MAKINGOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1995
- Information Displays and Choice Processes: Differential Effects of Organization, Form, and SequenceOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1994
- Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining TelepresenceJournal of Communication, 1992
- An Information-Processing Analysis of Graph PerceptionJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1987
- Research in Statistical GraphicsJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1987
- Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical MethodsJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1984
- A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction DecisionsJournal of Marketing Research, 1980
- The Judgment of SizeThe American Journal of Psychology, 1965