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Background Health management is impeded when consumers do not possess adequate knowledge about their illness. At a public health level, consumer knowledge about depression is particularly important because depression is highly prevalent and causes substantial disability and burden. However, currently little is known about the information needs of people with depression. This study aimed to investigate the explicit and implicit information needs of users of an online depression support forum. Methods A sample of 2680 posts was systematically selected from three discussion forums on an online depression bulletin board (blueboard.anu.edu.au). Data were examined for evidence of requests for information (reflecting explicit needs) and reports of past or current problems (implicit needs). Thematic analysis was conducted using a data-driven inductive approach with the assistance of NVivo 7, and instances of questions and people reporting particular types of problems were recorded. Results A total of 134 participants with personal experience of depression contributed to the data analysed. Six broad themes represented participant queries and reported problems: Understanding depression; disclosure and stigma; medication; treatment and services; coping with depression; and comorbid health problems. A variety of specific needs were evident within these broad thematic areas. Some people (n = 46) expressed their information needs by asking direct questions (47 queries) but the majority of needs were expressed implicitly (351 problems) by the 134 participants. The most evident need for information related to coping with depression and its consequences, followed by topics associated with medication, treatment and services. Conclusions People with depression have substantial unmet information needs and require strategies to deal with the difficulties they face. They require access to high quality and relevant online resources and professionals; thus, there is a need to rectify current gaps in the provision of information and limitations of dissemination. Greater knowledge about depression and its treatment is also needed at the general community level.

Little consumer knowledge about agriculture and livestock production as well as mounting concerns about the consequences of modern animal husbandry are pivotal aspects of the growing gap between famers and society. Literature shows that trust can play an important role in situations characterized by limited knowledge. In this paper a salient value similarity approach to social trust is adopted where social trust is placed on people that are perceived to hold similar goals. Determinants of social trust in farmers are examined and the influence of messages about livestock production is analyzed. The study is based on data from an online survey among 1,600 German participants containing an information treatment. Results confirm literature in that positive information increases, while negative information decreases social trust. We show that salient value similarity between consumers and farmers has a high positive influence on social trust in farmers, and moderates the effects of the perceived sender of the message.

La investigación sobre el consumidor ha sido el eje central del trabajo del planificador estratégico desde el nacimiento de la profesión en 1968. En concreto, en el origen de la disciplina de la Planificación Estratégica está la relevancia de la investigación cualitativa como fuente fiable para conocer en profundidad al consumidor y poder desarrollar campañas de comunicación eficaces, relevantes y distintivas. Por ello, y por la repercusión que tiene el conocimiento profundo del consumidor hoy en día, se va a hacer un repaso bibliográfico por las funciones que tradicionalmente ha adquirido el planificador en relación a la investigación para después aplicarlo a la realidad española actual a partir de un estudio empírico a los planificadores estratégicos españoles. El artículo termina con una reflexión sobre el papel relevante que el planner tendrá en un futuro muy próximo en el panorama de Big Data. Consumer research has been an essential point of the planner’s role since the birth of Account Planning in 1968. Overall, it can be found that in the discipline’s origin, the relevance of the qualitative research techniques is a truthful source that enables to have a depth understanding for the consumer to develop communication campaigns that have to be effective, relevant and distinctive. Due to the current repercussion of deep consumer knowledge, firstly this article has the aim to do a bibliographic review through the roles that traditionally the planner has acquired related to research. Secondly, the situation of strategic planning in Spain it will be studied thanks to an empirical analysis. The article finishes with some details of the relevant role that the planner will have in a near future at the Big Data environment.

Summary Regional food products are of contemporary interest as people are increasingly concerned to know where food comes from and how it is produced. Geographers have been slow to examine the link between product and place and this paper provides initial insights into the uptake of a European regulation designed to protect and promote high quality regional food and drink products in the United Kingdom. The early adopters of EU quality marks are shown to use them to protect their names from cheaper imitations rather than as a marketing device. Bureaucracy and costs of implementation, together with a lack of consumer knowledge, are likely to prevent rapid future adoption in the UK.

T HE study of consumers' knowledge of food prices has a relatively long tradition in marketing. Numerous food price recall studies have established that consumers' knowledge of prices is rather low. Gabor and Granger,' for example, reported that 65% of over 400 respondents did not know the correct prices of grocery products. Similarly, a Progressive Grocer study has shown that less than 50% of consumers were able to specify the correct price of 57 out of 59 supermarket items studied; and in some extreme cases only 10-20% of the study respondents knew the correct price.2 Many other studies have arrived at similar results.3 Such findings are usually regarded as having managerial implications, since they bear on the question of consumer sensitivity to price differences among products.4

This article examines developmental changes in memory structures to understand the development of consumer knowledge in children. Specifically, it investigates changes in memory structures that occur as children of different ages acquire information about common purchase events. The evidence indicates that increases in the amount of available information result in more well-developed structures for older but not younger children. These findings suggest that older children use more sophisticated processing skills and strategies than younger children as they acquire additional information and accumulate more experience in the marketplace.

Category priming has recently stirred the interest of judgment researchers. By unobtrusively presenting exemplars of a category, that category becomes temporarily more accessible from memory and more likely to be used subsequently in processing new information. This research extends work in cognitive and social psychology to consumer judgments. The two studies presented here examine conditions under which cognitive categories of price may be primed and the resulting effects on product judgment. The results also suggest that these effects are influenced by individual difference in consumer knowledge. Copyright 1989 by the University of Chicago.

This study suggests that category-based evaluative responses supplement the piecemeal-based evaluation processes more often studied in Consumer Research. The alternative modes of processing were found to be contingent upon the match/mismatch of information to category expectations. Compared to piecemeal (mismatch) processing, category-based (match) processing resulted in faster impression formation times, more verbalizations related to the product category, fewer verbalizations related to the product's attributes, and fewer references to subtypes. Expertise exaggerated these effects.

The effects of prior knowledge about a product class on various characteristics of pre-purchase information search within that product class are examined. A new search task methodology is used that imposes only a limited amount of structure on the search task: subjects are not cued with a list of attributes, and the problem is not structured in a brand-by-attribute matrix. The results indicate that prior knowledge facilitates the acquisition of new information and increases search efficiency. The results also support the conceptual distinction between objective and subjective knowledge.

E FFICIENT operation of a free enterprise system requires that consumers look after their own welfare. Persistent failure of consumers to safeguard their own interests can seriously weaken even the richly endowed economy of the United States. Moreover, consumer ignorance could well be a major cause of the economic privations of the poorest "third of the nation." It is universally acknowledged that consumers lack knowledge to some degree. However, no systematic effort has been made to probe the size of this deficiency. No one knows whether most consumers intelligently pursue their self-interest most of the time or whether most of them fail to do so most of the time.

The experiment reported here examines the growth of brand loyalty in a setting where there is no prior consumer knowledge about any of the available brands. Search behavior precedes the development of brand loyalty, which grows to measurable strength despite the virtual identity of the available brands, suggesting that some consumers are prone to brand-loyal behavior.