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This study aims to draw on the malleable nature of processing fluency to identify the role of consumer expectation in generating diverging effects of metacognitive experiences on perception of product innovativeness and product evaluation. It also examines critical boundary conditions to offer a more sophisticated understanding of the interactive effect of expectation and processing fluency.

Studies 1, 2A and 2B recruited 1,922 online participants, and Studies 3 and 4 recruited 644 college students. The authors manipulated product innovativeness expectation by exposing participants to expert reviews of new products, and processing fluency by presenting product detail in either easy-to-read font/color contrast or difficult-to-read font/color contrast. Subsequently, perceived product innovativeness and product evaluation including actual product adoption were measured.

When a product was expected to be innovative (ordinary), feelings of difficulty with processing its detail increased (decreased) perceived innovativeness and, in turn, interest in purchase. The observation occurred only when a credible external source (vs firms) generated the innovativeness expectation or consumers’ elaboration level was not high. Furthermore, when innovativeness became associated with negative implications, perceived innovativeness no longer enhanced but impaired purchase intention.

Studies used incrementally new products only. Really new products involving a high adoption risk might produce a diverging effect. The findings need to be replicated with higher involvement products. An ideal level of difficulty with comprehending product information was not examined in the present research.

Results carry significant weight for firms who seek to draw consumer attention to their new products by choosing an optimal format of product presentation. The findings suggest that they can proactively administer a proper level of ease/difficulty with comprehending product detail depending on the extent of product innovativeness and target audience.

Extant research has not addressed how the malleable nature of processing fluency systematically affects innovativeness perception and product evaluation. The key contribution of this paper to the metacognition literature is the role of consumer expectation that alters the meaning of metacognitive experiences in relation to innovativeness perception. In addition, this is one of the first to empirically investigate perceptual processing fluency in the elaboration likelihood model theory.

There is always a matching effect in advertising persuasion – the information that matches product characteristics or target consumer characteristics is considered to be relatively more persuasive. Based on the accessibility-diagnosability theory, this paper discusses the influence of the matching degree between the information presentation (vague description and precise description) and product attribute (vertical attribute and horizontal attribute) on people's attitudes toward advertising.

Study 1 aims to explore the impact of the matching effect of different information presentation methods (precise presentation vs vague presentation) and product attribute (horizontal attribute vs vertical attribute) on consumers' attitudes toward advertising; secondary data was used to support this research. Study 2 mainly used the situational simulated experiment to examine the results of study 1, and further explored the mediating mechanism of its matching effect.

The authors found that the matching degree between the information presentation method and product attribute will positively affect the fluency of advertising information processing, that is, the use of vague description of product vertical attribute can positively affect consumers' extraction fluency; while the use of precise description of product horizontal attribute can positively affect consumers' processing fluency, and both extraction fluency and processing fluency will positively affect consumers' attitude toward the advertisement.

An essential enlightenment of the research is that it sheds light on the interaction between product attribute (vertical attribute vs horizontal attribute) with the information presentation method (vague description vs precise description) from the perspective of accessibility-diagnosability theory, which explains consumers' information processing mechanisms in dealing with different advertising information.

The purpose of this study is two‐fold. First, to explore differences in consumers' deal perceptions for coupons framed as potential gains to be obtained versus equivalent losses to be avoided. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the underlying process of the effects of coupon framing on deal perceptions.

The study used controlled experiments to test hypotheses.

The study found that participants had more favorable deal perceptions and greater usage intentions of coupons that highlight their value as a discount to be obtained versus a loss to be avoided. Importantly, while the two frames differed in perceived novelty, framing effects on deal perceptions were shown to be due to processing fluency enhancing evaluations of gain‐framed coupons. Finally, the results demonstrated that consumers' deal proneness moderated the effect of processing fluency, eliminating the advantage of gain over loss frames for low deal‐prone consumers.

This research shows that consumer perceptions of deals are not just based on the information about the promotion they receive, but also on how fluently the information can be processed. It also provides evidence that consumers view coupons as potential gains, and that systematic processing is necessary for framing manipulations to be effective, which is true for high deal‐prone consumers. Lastly, it is shown that, in order for framing manipulations to increase deal perceptions, retailers need to motivate consumers to process coupons systematically.

This research provides useful information on consumer perceptions of deals with respect to coupons and information they receive.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of semantic fluency on consumers' aesthetic evaluation in graphic designs with text and the mediating effect of visual complexity in this relationship.

The hypotheses are examined in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 both verify that Chinese consumers rated the designs with low (vs high) semantic fluency words as more beautiful, and Experiment 3 further confirmed this effect in non-Chinese speakers.

Confirmed by Chinese and non-Chinese consumers, high fluency text leads to lower perceived visual complexity and less aesthetic perception of the entire design.

Findings enrich the theory of beauty standards and put forward challenges to the positive relationship between processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure. Findings are limited to the decorative function of text, and lack discussions on how designers should balance when the informational function of text is equally important.

This study is the first to discuss how designs with text influence consumers' aesthetic perception and provides meaningful guidelines of transnational marketing for fashion designers and enterprises.

This research explores the impacts of content-generating devices (mobile phones versus personal computers) and content features (social content and achievement content) on consumer engagement with marketer-generated content (MGC) on social media. It also examines these factors' interaction effects on consumer engagement.

The study analyzed MGC that 210 companies had posted to Sina Weibo over three years, testing the study’s proposed model with negative binomial regression analysis.

The study's results show that MGC generated via mobile phones attracts more consumer engagement than MGC generated via personal computers. MGC with more social features attracts more consumer engagement, whereas MGC with more achievement features reduces consumer engagement. The authors also found that MGC with more social features generated via mobile phones and MGC with more achievement features generated via personal computers lead to more consumer engagement due to the congruency of the construal level of psychological distance.

This research enriches the literature by exploring the effects of content-generating devices and content features on consumer engagement in the MGC context, which extends the research on consumer engagement with social media from the context of user-generated content to the MGC.

Marketing persuasive materials are often displayed on a curved surface (e.g. a curved hallway). This study aims to investigate how the curvature (concave vs convex) of a display surface influences the persuasion of the marketing appeals presented on it.

The conceptual framework was tested in a field experiment, a lab experiment and two online experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Analyses of variance and mediation analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

This research demonstrates that a concave (vs convex) display surface may increase persuasion for marketing materials with social appeals. This occurs because a concave surface enhances consumers’ perception of self–other overlap, which is matched with the content of the social appeal presented on it, thereby enhancing the appeal’s persuasiveness. It further identifies the appeal content as an important moderator of the effect; a convex (vs concave) display would enhance persuasion when the marketing materials contain personal appeals.

Future research could investigate how a time delay (e.g. hours, days) and the curvature of a display board or wall would play a role in the effect of display curvature.

The findings offer a novel, simple and cost-effective approach to enhance persuasion for both nonprofit and for-profit marketing materials.

This research contributes to the persuasion literature by investigating the impact of one ubiquitous but overlooked aspect of the message setting (i.e. the curvature of the message’s display surface) on persuasion while holding the message source and content constant. It also advances knowledge on consumer shape perception by examining an underexplored shape (i.e. the curved shape of a display surface) that is nondiagnostic in message persuasion.

This study aims to compare and contrast the effectiveness of single- and dual-product repetition strategies in the brand placement context. The study also aims to explore the number of repetitions needed for achieving maximum impact on brand memory (i.e. recall and recognition) and brand attitudes.

The proposed hypotheses and research questions were tested using a quasi-experimental approach. Participants watched a block of eight videos containing four different levels comprising one, three, five and seven repetitions of products belonging to the same umbrella brand. Subsequently, participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure brand memory and brand attitudes.

Results indicate that dual-product brand placements could elicit higher levels of brand recall than that of single-product brand placements at moderate and high levels of repetition (i.e. five and seven). Moreover, at a high level of repetition (i.e. seven repetitions), the brand attitudes of consumers exposed to dual-product brand placements are significantly higher when product categories are dissimilar.

Consumers are increasingly exposed to multiple products of the same umbrella brands when watching various video content. However, prior research has not examined the effects of brand placement repetition in the umbrella branding context. This study is the first attempt at combining research streams on umbrella branding and brand placements and comparing the effects of repetitive exposure to single- and dual-product brand placements on consumers’ memory and brand attitudes.

Enterprises' multichannel operations provide various avenues for customer interaction; however, existing literature investigating customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) mainly focuses on a single channel. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the spillover effect of CCI and potential underlying mediating mechanisms in different information channels.

Three between-subjects experiments with 946 participants were employed to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the context of an experiential product and a material product.

Results suggest the clear spillover effect of CCI, indicating that positive CCI improves focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention, whereas negative CCI reduces focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention. Moreover, CCI's spillover effect varies based on the CCI channel. Offline CCI has a stronger positive spillover effect than online CCI. Contrarily, online CCI has a stronger negative spillover effect than offline CCI. Customer experience and trust are demonstrated to have mediating roles in this process.

This study is the first to comprehensively understand and compare the CCI spillover effect of the two information channels. The findings add to the existing knowledge of information processing in the psychological mechanisms influencing the belief in addition to providing insights for companies engaged in multichannel operations management across different channels.

This study examines the relationship between streamers' product descriptions, customer comments and online sales and focuses on the moderating effect of streamer–viewer relationship strength.

Between June 2021 and April 2022, the structured data of 965 livestreaming and unstructured text data of 42,956,147 characters from two major live-streaming platforms were collected for the study. Text analysis and regression analysis methods were employed for data analysis.

First, the authors' analysis reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between comment length and product sales. Notably, comment volume and comment emotion positively influence product sales. Furthermore, the semantic richness, emotion and readability of streamers' product descriptions also positively influence product sales. Secondly, the authors find that the strength of streamer–viewer relationship weakens the positive effects of comment volume and comment emotion without moderating the inverted U-shaped effect of comment length. Lastly, the strength of streamer–viewer relationship also diminishes the positive effects of emotion, semantics and readability of streamers' product descriptions on product sales.

This study is the first to concurrently examine the direct and interactive effects of user-generated content (UGC) and marketer-generated content (MGC) on consumer purchase behaviors in livestreaming e-commerce, offering a novel perspective on individual decision-making and cue utilization in the social retail context.

In response to consumer and society demands for firms to be socially responsible, brands have been taking a strategic approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) by integrating socially responsible activities into their brands’ core value propositions to strengthen brand equity. Thus, from a brand building perspective, this paper aims to investigate the immediate effect that brand CSR communications have on the change in brand awareness, perceived quality and loyalty, to provide a deeper understanding of how each dimension affects the overall change in brand equity.

With evidence from an experiment conducted in three different countries (Australia, United States and Spain), based on an actual brand CSR program, this paper explores the different immediate effects of change in brand awareness, perceived brand quality and brand loyalty, after the exposure to a CSR message, on the overall immediate change in value that consumers give to a brand. Furthermore, it examines the role of brand-cause fit and the influence that differences in cultural, economic and political environments have on this effect.

The change in brand loyalty due to CSR communication is the key dimension driving the immediate positive change in overall brand equity. In addition, change in brand awareness has an inverted U-shape relationship with change in overall brand equity, whereas the change in perceived brand quality does not have an influence. Finally, the results indicate that this immediate effect holds regardless of the level of brand-cause fit, but is greater in countries where firms are expected to participate and CSR reporting is not mandatory, making such practices be seen as voluntary.

The findings of this study offer research implications for academics, and practical considerations for brand managers, interested in how to rapidly generate changes in consumer perception by leveraging CSR activities for brand building in global settings. Specifically, it indicates that when the aim is to quickly build brand equity, the goal of communicating CSR activities must be to increase the level of attachment that consumers have to the brand since loyalty is the main driver of the immediate change in overall brand equity.

Although many scholars have demonstrated the impact of CSR on various consumer behavior outcomes (e.g., brand attitude, purchase intention, loyalty), from a brand build perspective the implications of the immediate effect of a brand communication of CSR practices on consumer-based brand equity remain less clear. This study addresses this gap to gain a deeper understanding of how to rapidly generate changes in consumer perception to build strong brands while leveraging CSR practices.