Effects of social distance and matching message orientation on consumers' product evaluation

Abstract

Despite a tremendous increase in the online sales of experiential products (e.g., clothes), how to present such kind of products to better intrigue online consumers remains unsolved. Relative to model presentation (i.e., presented by professional models), peer presentation (i.e., presented by peer consumers) is emerging as a new way of IT-enabled product presentation welcomed by online clothing merchants. Drawing on the Construal Level Theory, we examine the effects of peer presentation vs. model presentation, and the fitness between recommendation messages and these two types of presentation. We propose that compared to model presentation, peer presentation yields a closer psychological distance to a consumer, and is likely to arouse a lower level mental construal of the consumer. Thus, alongside peer presentation, a recommendation message that fits a low level construal (i.e., secondary features) is more persuasive. Contrarily, alongside model presentation, a recommendation message that fits a high level construal (i.e., primary features) is more persuasive. Lab experiments and a field experiment are designed to test these hypotheses. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.