EXPRESS: Dual Market Navigation

Dual market navigation refers to consumers’ ongoing engagement across structurally distinct and institutionally separate markets. While prior research has focused on how consumers use service cues to evaluate individual service providers or products, little is known about how consumers use these cues across structurally distinct markets, despite their growing prevalence. We address this gap by extending cue utilization theory to the market level, shifting attention from firm-led, market-expansion strategies to consumer-led, dual-market strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from insured consumers living and routinely shopping for healthcare along the U.S.-Mexico border, we develop the concept of strategic cue auditing: the sensemaking process consumers use to evaluate intrinsic and/or extrinsic cue(s) and make comparative assessments of market-level quality cues across different contexts. We identify three cue auditing strategies (reactive, cultural-relational, and cross-comparative) that reveal how consumers make sense of competing market logics when judging service and product quality. These strategies shape healthcare choices and reveal what we conceptualize as cue misfires and misalignments. By theorizing cue utilization as structurally contingent and market-level, this research advances understanding of dual-market navigation beyond healthcare and offers implications for marketers and policymakers operating in contexts including cross-border, online-offline, and formal-informal markets.