Yao Fei-Si, Shao Jing-Bo, Zhang He
Department of Economics and Trade, School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jul 5;12:619340. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.619340. eCollection 2021.
Recent years has witnessed a rapid growth in online shopping. This paper draws from the construal level theory to examine the divergent effects of the creative text descriptions of products on consumers' purchase intention in an online context. It also investigates consumers' construal level and the moderating role of construal level in this relationship. An assumption has been made that the creative description embraces more rhetorical devices with analogies. In doing so, such texts are in need of consumers who are having a more abstract, top-down, flexible mindset, which makes it more persuasive to some consumers with high-level construal. Three experiments add evidence to this study. These results suggest that the creative text descriptions are generally more persuasive than the non-creative ones in an online context, and that the persuasiveness of the creative descriptions can be accentuated (vs. attenuated) especially for high- (vs. low-) level construal individuals. The findings hold various theoretical implications for the creative marketing messages and construal level theory. First, in the current research, broadening, and integrating relevant research were possible by exploring the creative language in an online context. Also, it demonstrates that construal level-that is, consumers' internal thoughts, rather than external factors-influences their preference for a creative description style, thus helping extend the applications of the construal level theory to the field of creative marketing communications and integrate the research discoveries in metaphor communication.
近年来，网上购物发展迅速。本文借鉴解释水平理论，研究产品的创意文本描述在网络环境中对消费者购买意愿的不同影响。同时，探讨消费者的解释水平以及解释水平在此关系中的调节作用。研究假设创意描述包含更多带有类比的修辞手法。这样一来，此类文本需要具有更抽象、自上而下、灵活思维方式的消费者，这使得它对一些具有高水平解释的消费者更具说服力。三项实验为该研究提供了证据。这些结果表明，在网络环境中，创意文本描述通常比非创意文本描述更具说服力，并且创意描述的说服力对于高水平（相对于低水平）解释的个体而言尤其会增强（相对于减弱）。这些发现对创意营销信息和解释水平理论具有多种理论意义。首先，在当前研究中，通过在网络环境中探索创意语言，拓宽并整合相关研究成为可能。此外，研究表明，解释水平，即消费者的内在思维，而非外部因素，影响他们对创意描述风格的偏好，从而有助于将解释水平理论的应用扩展到创意营销传播领域，并整合隐喻传播方面的研究发现。
