This article examines an innovative international marketing tool for understanding multicountry consumer decision making. Two personal interview studies of consumers, one from the United States and the other from Germany, are subjected to a content analysis and statistical routines to examine need recognition, prepurchase search, evaluation of alternatives, and purchase decisions, in the women's apparel catalog market. The findings show that consumers follow decision-making paths with definable characteristics, and that these paths differ within countries but not across countries, except by the proportion traversing particular paths.
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