Susan Broniarczyk

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

The affiliation is the one printed on the 1998 paper, the University of Texas at Austin, shared with her two co-authors. Her wider career was not surveyed for this page, so no later position is asserted. What can be described is the study, which is the work this site draws on.

Key papers

Broniarczyk, S. M., Hoyer, W. D., & McAlister, L. (1998), 'Consumers’ Perceptions of the Assortment Offered in a Grocery Category: The Impact of Item Reduction', Journal of Marketing Research, 35(2), 166-176, doi:10.1177/002224379803500203. Read at the level of the published abstract and through later papers that cite it.

Her wider publication record was not surveyed for this page.

Key ideas

The paper starts from a standoff. Grocery retailers had been told that to stay competitive they must reduce the number of items they carry, in line with consumer demand, a principle labelled efficient assortment. Retailers resisted, fearing that eliminating items would lower consumers' perceptions of the assortment and make them less likely to choose the store.

The authors ran two studies on how consumers form those perceptions when items are removed, with a particular emphasis on two cues: whether a favourite product is still available, and how much shelf space the category keeps. Their conclusion was that retailers might be able to make substantive reductions without negatively affecting assortment perceptions and store choice, as long as only low-preference items are eliminated and category space is held constant. They added that the risk in item reduction might be more limited than initially thought.

The finding set the terms for what followed. Peter Boatwright and Joseph Nunes summarised it in 2001 as showing cuts of up to 54 per cent of low-selling items with no significant effect on perceived variety or sales, and then tested a larger cut at an online grocer. A 2005 study using that grocer's records for every category found that customers ordered less often after the cuts. The 1998 conditions, low-preference items only and constant space, are the part of her work that the later studies kept.

The idea is described on this site as perceived variety, and the retail decision it informs as assortment reduction.

What a retailer can take from the 1998 paper

The paper is the reason a range review can begin with a list of what shoppers prefer least. Its two cues give an owner something to check before a cut, whether the favourites are all still on the shelf and whether the category keeps its space. If both hold, the abstract's conclusion is that the loss in perceived assortment may be smaller than feared.

The conditions are narrow. The studies concerned grocery categories, and the abstract speaks of perceptions of the assortment and of store choice, which are not the same as sales over time. Later field work from an online grocer, set out on the assortment reduction page, found that a cut can leave the look of the range intact and still change how often customers order. The 1998 paper does not contradict that, because it did not follow households over months.

For this site the paper is the earliest anchor of the argument. It gives the shopper's side of a range cut, and the later papers give the till's side. A reader who wants only one of the two will misread the other.

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