What is Information Search?
Information search is the consumer's effort to gather decision-relevant information. Internal search draws on memory: which brands does the consumer already recall? External search uses four source types — personal (friends, family, social network), commercial (advertising, salespeople, websites), public (independent reviews, ratings, blogs), experiential (trial, demo, in-store inspection). The relative weight of each source varies by category: personal sources dominate for restaurants, public sources for cars, experiential for clothing. Marketers must show up wherever target customers actually search.
How Information Search actually works
The framework breaks down into the following moving parts. Knowing what each piece is — and what it is not — is what separates a B-grade answer from an A-grade answer in a written assignment.
- Internal search — brands recalled from memory; this is why brand awareness matters
- Personal sources — recommendations from friends, family, online communities
- Commercial sources — paid media, salespeople, branded websites
- Public sources — independent reviews, ratings (Consumer Reports, RT)
- Experiential sources — test drive, free trial, in-store demo
- Source weight differs by category and risk
A worked example: Tripadvisor / Booking.com
For travel, public sources dominate the search stage. Tripadvisor, Booking.com, and Google Reviews together capture the bulk of hotel research. Hotels that ignored review platforms in 2010 saw bookings drop within months — the source of truth had moved from brochures and travel agents to user-generated reviews. Today, hotel revenue managers spend material time on review response, photo curation, and ranking optimization, because the search stage now happens almost entirely on independent platforms.
Don't lose marks for these
- Investing only in commercial sources when the category is review-driven
- Ignoring internal search by under-investing in brand awareness
- Confusing search effort with purchase intent
How to use this on the exam
Score-maximizing moves
- Map each of four external source types to a tactic
- Identify which source dominates for the category
- Connect search to consideration set formation
When to use Information Search (and when not to)
Use Information Search when your assignment asks you to analyze, structure, or recommend — and when you have at least two data points to populate every cell of the framework. Skip it when the question is asking for a numerical answer or a single recommendation, since Information Search is a structuring tool, not a calculator.