Types of Audience Decisions 83Sourcing Decisions: Responses to Offers From Vendors
Audiences who want to choose the best supplier or vendor of a product, service, or piece of infor-
mation make sourcing decisions. For example, purchasing agents make sourcing decisions when
they choose among competing vendors or designate a preferred supplier. Consumers make them
when they decide among competing fast food restaurants. Students make them when they choose
among competing MBA programs. Readers make sourcing decisions when they choose between
reading an article from The New York Times posted online at nytimes.com and the same article
posted online at msn.com.
Suppliers seek sourcing decisions when they want their clients and customers to use their fi rm,school, website, or store as a source of goods or services. Documents and presentations suppliers
produce in order to elicit sourcing decisions include e-commerce websites , retail advertisements , store
catalogs , and sales presentations.
Many criteria, such as convenience and product availability, show up repeatedly in consumersourcing decisions.^95 When women in the United States choose a department store at which to
shop, the fi ve criteria most important to them are ease of locating merchandise, return policy,
knowledgeable salespeople, quality of fi tting rooms, and store location.^96 When adolescents shop
for clothes, price is the most important criterion for store selection. Other criteria, such as product
variety, product availability, and store display are also important but carry more weight for adoles-
cent females than males.^97 For young adults, apparel store selection is driven by the store’s layout,
ambience, product availability, convenience, and promotions.^98 Online shoppers choose all types of
online retailers on the basis of the site’s ease of use, product offerings, and order handling, as well as
the e-tailer’s size and reputation.^99
Purchasing agents for large organizations go through multiple steps when selecting suppliersfor long-term contracts. They fi rst eliminate suppliers who have a poor record of quality, delivery,
service, or a consistently higher price.^100 After receiving quotes from the remaining vendors, the
purchasing agents’ decision criteria include the vendor’s shipping costs, payment terms, and war-
ranties. Only after the agents identify the vendors who meet these criteria does price become an
important factor.
When purchasing agents decide whether to repurchase from a current supplier, the suppliers’commitment to the customer relationship, payment facilities, and product quality all have an impact
on purchasing agents’ repurchase intentions; the infl uence of price is comparatively insignifi cant.^101
New suppliers, on the other hand, typically need to quote a price between 5% and 8% lower than
existing suppliers to get a piece of the organization’s business.
The decision criteria professional retail buyers use when selecting vendors include the ven-dor’s reputation, anticipated margin, reliability, speed of delivery, and the reputation of the
products offered.^102 Surprisingly, buyers weight the vendor’s production facilities and the gross
margins on the vendor’s merchandise more heavily than customer demand for the products.^103
For global sourcing decisions, the most commonly used supplier selection criteria include
price, quality, technology access, lead time, labor relations, proximity to the market, and cultural
similarity.^104
The following list of questions generalizes the buyer-specifi c decision criteria identifi ed previ-ously and provides a starting point for predicting an expert audience’s decision criteria for any
particular sourcing decision. The list can also serve as an outline for the documents and presenta-
tions professionals produce in order to elicit sourcing decisions from potential buyers.
- What are the supplier’s prices?
- How available and extensive is their selection?