Why it is so hard to predict our partner’s product preferences: The effect of target familiarity on prediction accuracy

Many buying decisions require predictions of another person’s product attitudes. Yet, consumers are often inaccurate predictors, even for familiar others. We provide strong evidence that target familiarity can even hurt accuracy in the presence of attitude feedback. Although overprojection and lack of product-specific attitude information have been identified as possible reasons for prediction inaccuracy, our results suggest a retrieval explanation. When presented with product-specific at-titude feedback, predictors adapted their level of projection and encoded theattitude information, but they did not use this information. Instead, they retrieved less di-agnostic, pre-stored information about the familiar targets to predict their product attitudes. For many product decisions consumers predict others’product attitudes. For instance, consumers are found to make predictions about their co-consumers ’ product pref-erences before engaging in a joint decision process, such as buying furniture or deciding where to have dinner (e.g., Krishnamurthi 1983; Park 1982). Also when buying prod-ucts for others, such as when purchasing gifts, consumers search for a product that matches the receiver’s attitudes (e.g., Wooten 2000). Research on agent decision making provides additional examples of people, varying from knowledgeable neighbors to trained experts (like financial analysts and real estate agents), who make product attitude predictions for others (e.g., Solomon 1986; West 1996). Also in personal selling, good salespeople need to empathize with the complex feelings and preferences of their customers (Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan 1986). Similarly, product managers often rely on their own intuitive predictions about consumers *Davy Lerouge is assistant professor of marketing at Tilburg University