Search results

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.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of integration quality, perceived fluency and assurance quality on brand engagement and trust, and their impacts on brand loyalty in the omnichannel banking setting. It further explores the critical role of personal innovativeness and demographic characteristics as moderating variables for the propositions in the research model.

An online survey of 1,547 respondents was carried out with bank customers located in the three largest cities of Vietnam, who have already used at least two various transactional channels in the past. The results were analyzed by the partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The findings denote that integration quality, perceived fluency and assurance quality significantly influence brand trust. Whereas, brand engagement is only affected by integration quality and perceived fluency. Further, brand engagement and trust are substantiated as critical drivers of brand loyalty in omnichannel banking. Customers with high personal innovativeness produce fewer effects of omnichannel properties on brand engagement and trust than other ones. The research context is found to be a significant moderator for the effect of perceived fluency on brand engagement.

This study offers several recommendations for bank managers to develop a successful omnichannel strategy that could enhance brand engagement and trust by improving integration quality, maintaining fluency across various channels and assuring security during the transactional process. It suggests various policies to improve the effectiveness of the omnichannel model towards the clients with high innovativeness.

This research extends the social exchange theory (SET) theory by examining the effects of omnichannel properties on brand engagement, trust and loyalty in the banking sector. The moderating role of personal innovativeness and research context is also explored.

Casual online shoppers without a strong intention to purchase items can easily leave web sites within seconds. However, there is little research examining how and why consumers are engaged momentarily when they are exposed to a target stimulus in a low involvement shopping situation. This online experiment study seeks to investigate the possibility of enhancing situational involvement with personal and stimulus factors, namely enduring involvement and perceived perceptual fluency, and to determine how enjoyment contributes to the relations among enduring involvement, perceptual fluency, cognitive effort, and situational involvement, in a low‐involvement online shopping context.

An online experiment was conducted to test the conceptual model. Two mock web sites with different levels of perceptual fluency were developed to test effects of perceptual fluency on situational involvement, and participants completed an online survey after viewing one on the web site.

Structural equation modeling was performed to test the proposed model (n=657). The result confirmed that perceived perceptual fluency elicited enjoyment, which in turn positively affected situational involvement, purchase intention, and cognitive effort. Enduring involvement influences enjoyment, cognitive effort, and purchase intention in a web‐browsing situation. Enjoyment plays a key role by mediating the perceptual fluency effect and enduring involvement effect on purchase intention and cognitive effort. The findings of the current study demonstrated that perceptual fluency of a stimulus could engage people by enhancing enjoyment.

The current study provides an insight into comprehensively understanding how situational involvement can be created through visual information display/web site design as well as a personal factor. The study uniquely approaches the issue of involvement and engagement through internal, psychological process of consumers. Also, the empirical support for the proposed model successfully extends the perceptual fluency hypothesis, contributing to the field of literature.

The purpose of this study is to understand the joint effects of individuals’ need for status and processing fluency on customer attitudes toward hotels’ participation in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

This study uses a 2 (Need for status: high vs low) × 2 (Processing fluency: high vs low) experimental design with processing fluency being manipulated and individuals’ need for status being measured.

The results indicate that although high-need for status customers exhibit a more positive attitude than low-need for status customers when the CSR message is easy to process, they show similar attitude levels when processing fluency is relatively low.

This study makes great contribution to the literature of status consumption by examining CSR as one of the new areas that consumers use to signal social status beyond luxury products. For practitioners, the results of this study offer suggestions on how to design CSR messages to increase its effectiveness.

As an alternative to straight rhetorical questions, questions using analogies that invite the reader to think about the frame of reference to answer the target have been used in advertising to persuade. This paper aims to investigate consumer responses to the use of analogical questions in ads for incrementally new products and the important variables moderating those responses.

Four between-subjects experiments examined how product evaluations in response to analogical questions differ from non-analogical variants as a function of consumers’ persuasion awareness (Studies 1 and 2) and also tested if the effectiveness of an analogical question among potential consumers who are more aware of persuasion attempts might be enhanced only when it is proposed with a strong rather than a weak frame of reference (Study 3), and when the frame of reference and the target share underlying similarities (Study 4).

Analogical questions are more persuasive than non-analogical variants for participants who are more aware of persuasion attempts. Inferential fluency mediates the results. Furthermore, the positive impact of analogical questions for participants high in persuasion awareness is diminished when the frame of reference is weak or from a dissimilar domain. The same patterns are not evident for participants who are less aware of persuasion attempts.

Drawing on the concepts of inferential fluency, this study offers an empirically-based view of how the analogical questions in advertising may bias the responses exhibited by individuals who demonstrate either a high or low level of persuasion awareness.

The inclusion of an analogy can lower consumers’ tendency to behave in a defensive manner by facilitating inferences about intended claims that are implicitly stated in a rhetorical question and achieve higher levels of persuasion.

This study contributes to prior study on rhetorical questions within a persuasion communication by adopting inferential fluency as an underlying mechanism for analyzing the impact of analogical questions and individual’s awareness of persuasion.

The purpose of this paper is to critique the current wave of naming cultures in information literacy practice, the relationship between information literacy, literacy theory, and fluency theory, and suggests alternative conceptualizations for information seeking behavior.

After conducting literature and website reviews, a survey was posted on the Survey Monkey commercial site and librarians were invited to participate. The resulting analysis offers a synthesis of the literature and survey statistics.

Fewer programs than expected use “information fluency” as the defining factor in their library instruction programs. However, responses to the survey were useful in thinking about ways to retain a focus on information literacy theory in light of alternate naming conventions.

With over 200 respondents, the quantitative research component is healthy though clearly not exhaustive. Future researchers may wish to focus their quantitative research on specific locations or types of libraries.

While a number of writers have presented practical and theoretical work related to information fluency, few authors chose to question the existence of fluency standards or the assessment of these standards. In addition, the researchers respond to concerns about linear and hierarchical constructions of literacy by offering an alternate model.

Drawn from the concepts of processing fluency and mental imagery, the present study aims to fill the void by developing the mechanism underlying consumers' cognitive processing of visually appealing digital content in social media (i.e. Instagram) of retail brands.

Data were gathered using a web-based survey method with consumers residing in the USA (N = 328). Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to investigate the proposed hypotheses. In addition, measurement invariance and multigroup analyses were conducted to test the moderation effect of need for cognition (NFC).

The results supported the pivotal role of mental imagery when consumers process visual messages in the context of a retail brand's Instagram. Both comprehension fluency and imagery fluency positively influence mental imagery, which in turn cultivates positive attitude towards the brand. The mediating role of mental imagery is confirmed. Furthermore, individuals' NFC interacts with imagery fluency but not with comprehension fluency such that high NFC strengthens the effect of imagery fluency on mental imagery. That is, when high-NFC consumers process information on Instagram, their perceptions of ease of generating imagery likely evoke visual representation of the brand's messages on Instagram in their minds.

This research provides feasible ways for brands to increase the effectiveness of digital marketing communications in social media (e.g. optimising of the contextual features of visual information and employing interactive features such as filters of social media to enhance processing fluency).

Within the context of digital retailing, this study provides a new perspective of consumers' imagery processing to investigate the effectiveness of visual-focussed messages.

Fear appeals in advertising communication are considered by advertisers when other types of advertising appeals do not achieve expected effects. Fear appeals, by arousing the fear that something may threaten consumers’ present lives, are often adopted to persuade individuals to take a particular action. Although this topic has been widely studied, the internal operation mechanism of fear appeals in consumers has not been fully understood or agreed upon.

Three experiments were conducted where the type of fear appeal was manipulated (i.e. physical fear appeal or social ear appeal), as well as consumers’ consideration of future consequences (CFC) and mental imagery approaches.

This study examined the effects of fear appeal on mental imagery fluency and how it affects advertising effectiveness and the moderating effect of consumers’ CFC were discussed. When receiving advertisements with physical fear appeals, consumers with low CFC had greater mental imagery fluency than did those with high CFC. Furthermore, consumers’ purchase intentions could be improved by increasing consumers’ mental imagery fluency on fear appeal. Therefore, the interaction between fear appeal and CFC on purchase intention was mediated by mental imagery fluency. This study found that consumers responded differently to fear appeal advertising when they engaged in different mental imagery approaches.

The present study adds to social marketing literature by showing how consumers’ mental imagery fluency influence the fear appeal effectiveness, and this study’s results also enable social marketers to understand the two factors (i.e. consumers’ CFC level and mental imagery approaches) that affect the influence of fear appeals on consumers’ purchase intentions. Moreover, social marketers are recommended to provide consumers with advertising information by using various message types to facilitate consumers’ imagination of advertising appeals. This heightens the importance of consumers’ acceptance and absorption of advertising content, in turn, strengthening their purchase intentions.

This study aims to investigate the joint effect of three factors – processing fluency, the individuals’ need for cognition (NFC) and mood – on consumer skepticism toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages.

Study 1 uses a 2 (fluency: high versus low) × 2 (NFC: high versus low) design. In Study 2, a three-way interaction between fluency, NFC and mood was explored.

Individuals high in need for cognition responded more positively after reading a CSR message that is difficult to process. On the other hand, people low in NFC exhibited a higher level of skepticism toward CSR messages with low processing fluency. In addition, such an effect was moderated by mood. Positive mood (versus negative mood) increased dopamine levels, which further reduced skepticism.

Hospitality marketers should not simply assume that all consumers process information in the same fashion and, therefore, design their CSR message using the “one size fits all” strategy. It is critical for them to understand the importance of how to present the CSR messages to communicate with customers more effectively.

CSR has been increasingly used as a marketing tool by firms because of its positive effect on company reputation and customers’ purchase intentions. However, one of the greatest challenges corporate marketers are facing with regard to CSR programs is consumer skepticism. No prior research investigated the impact of processing fluency, individuals’ need for cognition and mood on consumer skepticism. This study fills this gap in the hospitality literature.

This paper aims to investigate the role of attention, processing motivation and processing depth in the relationship between self-reported subjective processing fluency and relevant advertisement variables such as ad attitude, brand attitude and purchase intentions.

Two empirical studies were conducted using self-report questionnaires.

In Study 1 (N = 176), the measure of self-reported subjective processing fluency was pretested. As expected, it was found to be sensitive to visual and semantic features of advertisements and to predict attitudes toward an advertisement. In Study 2 (N = 204), mediation analyses showed that self-reported subjective processing fluency was a predictor of attitude toward the advertisement (through attention and processing depth), attitude toward the brand (through processing depth) and purchase intentions (through processing depth).

The results emphasize the role of cognitive processing in explaining the effect of processing fluency on attitudes in marketing research.

Practitioners could use this theoretical framework and take into account the fluency with which consumers process information to improve the way they advertise their products.

The results suggest that self-reported subjective processing fluency can be relevant to predicting consumers’ attitudes because it increases attention and processing depth of the advertisement.