A Fluency Account of How Price Operates as a Cue to Psychological Distance

Building on construal level theory (CLT; Trope and Liberman, 2003), we propose that the price of a product, like time (e.g., Liberman and Trope, 1998), spatial distance (e.g., Fujita, et al. 2006), social distance (e.g., Chandran and Menon 2004), and probability (e.g., Todorov et al. 2006), creates a psychological distance between consumers and consumption. In particular, because access to more expensive products is more limited than to more affordable ones, higher prices create a higher psychological distance between customers and their objects of desire. We propose this price-induced psychological distance to be an overgeneralization of the principle that relatively more expensive products require to work or save for a longer period of time before being able to purchase them. Based on recent findings on the interaction between price and construal level (Bornemann and Homburg 2011; Hansen and Wänke 2011; Hansen, Kutzner, Wänke 2013; Yan and Sengupta 2011), we propose that generating a feeling of fit between the price of an object and the construal-level of the advertising slogans promoting it – a low/low or high/high match – will improves both advertisement and product evaluations compared to situations of non-fit. This prediction relies on a mechanism where situations of fit will lead consumers to experience greater cognitive fluency when evaluating the product (e.g., Lee, Keller, and Sternthal 2010, Tsai and McGill 2011). We further support this rationale by demonstrating that consumers with a low (vs. high) tendency to enjoy thinking, low need for cognition (NFC; Cacioppo, Petty, and Kao 1984), rely more on this fit or non-fit between prices and construal levels of advertising slogans when making judgments. We present four experiments investigating this price-construal fit framework.