Recently we developed two hard laddering methods.The first was administered via a computer, and the second took the form of a paper-and-pencil questionnaire (see Russell et al., 2004). In the paper-and-pencil hard laddering (PL) method, respondents were required to complete branching ‘‘charts’’. The computerised form of hard laddering (CL) required consumers to create their ladders by selecting items from two-column tables on a computer screen using a mouse click. In both of these methods (PL and CL) consumers were able to skip levels of abstraction and ‘‘fork’’ their answers (i.e. give more than one response as to why an attribute or consequence was important to them). This was thought to be more akin to soft laddering where consumers fork and skip without restraint. Both of these hard laddering methods used a priori lists (Audenaert & Steenkamp, 1997; Fotopoulos, Krystalis, & Ness, 2003; ValetteFlorence, 1998; Valette-Florence, Sirieix, Grunert, & Nielsen, 2000) pertaining to four levels of abstraction: attributes; physical consequences; psychosocial consequences and values (see below), from which participantswere required to choose appropriate constructs. PL participants were required to write in their answers from the corresponding lists and to put a dash in those boxes where they considered there to be no appropriate responses available on the a priori lists. These participants were permitted to fork their responses to a maximum of 3 attributes, 9 physical consequences, 27 psychosocial consequences and 27 values. This design allowed participants access to previous responses. The CL participants were permitted to fork their responses to a maximum of 3 attributes, 9 physical consequences, 27 psychosocial consequences and 81 values. In individual