Rural Retailer’s Choice Tactics:A Conceptual Framework for Empirical Research

The role of ‘heuristics’ in problem solving as an area of inquiry has caught the attention of academicians and practitioners and has generated considerable interest among these groups. Extending it to consumer decision-making, it has been found that the consumers tend to reduce decision effort through heuristics. Consumers employ simple decision rules, what we call ‘choice tactics’, for making complex purchase decisions. The choice tactics employed by the consumers is subjected to continuous processing and extended to post-purchase evaluation stage as well (Deshpande et al., 1982; Hoyer, 1984; and D’Astous et al., 1989). On the basis of outcome of purchase/consumption, the tactic is reused, fine-tuned or changed by the consumer during repurchase or reconsumption. This phenomenon, however, has not been studied in the context of retailers. The present research proposes to explore the ‘choice tactics’ for rural retailers. This paper focuses on the choice making by the retailers for stocking as well as sourcing. How does a rural retailer take his stocking decisions for repeat-purchase, low-involvement products? To give complete account of the problem, two research questions have been developed and then stated which look into the decision effort put in by the rural retailer, the choice tactics employed by him and the influence of internal information sources and the task difficulty on his choice tactics while purchasing repeat-purchase, low-involvement products.