Our brand or product knowledge, the number and similarity of brand choices and time pressures
present, and the social context (such as the need for justification to a peer or boss) all may affect
whether and how we use choice heuristics.63
Consumers don’t necessarily use only one type of choice rule. For example, they might use a
noncompensatory decision rule such as the conjunctive heuristic to reduce the number of brand
choices to a more manageable number, and then evaluate the remaining brands. One reason for the
runaway success of the Intel Inside campaign in the 1990s was that it made the brand the first cutoff
for many consumers—they would buy only a personal computer that had an Intel microprocessor.
Leading personal computer makers at the time such as IBM, Dell, and Gateway had no choice
but to support Intel’s marketing efforts