A substantial body of scholarly work focuses on the conditions under which industrial buyers are likely to search for information relevant to the buying decision-and on the sources of information they use most often. Yet there has been relatively little attention to the relationship between the sources of information used by industrial purchasers and the topics which are the focus of their search effort. In this research organizational buyers provided data which is used to reveal the underlying relationships between the sources consulted and the topics considered. Ihe results of this exploratory research provide new empirical evidence concerning tlie “direction of search” and stimulate further thinking about various aspects of information search in industrial buying decisions. © 1993 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
