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We investigated the combined effect on consumers of the perceptual fluency of price discounts and the two promotional cues of discount duration and frequency. We proposed that consumers' initial responses to price discounts would be maintained or modified depending on the processing fluency of discount information. Results from 2 experiments showed that when a promotional cue implied a short discount duration or low discount frequency and the discount information was difficult to process, participants perceived the duration as longer or the frequency as higher, and they evaluated the product less favorably if the discount information was difficult to process compared to if it was easy to process. On the contrary, when a cue implied a long discount duration or a high discount frequency, participants perceived the duration as shorter or the frequency as lower and evaluated the product more favorably if the discount information was difficult to process compared to if it was easy to process. We show conditions in which processing disfluency can be beneficial.
Keywords: processing fluency, price discount, promotion duration, promotion frequency.
Imagine that you are visiting your favorite store to buy daily necessities. When passing by a display stand of body products, you find that body lotions are on sale. However, you have some difficulty processing the discount information because the regular and discount prices are not as clearly marked as usual. In this case, would your response to the price discount differ from a case when the discount was clearly marked?
Research has revealed that it is not only the content of information but also the degree of difficulty individuals experience when processing the information that affects their response to the information (Motyka, Suri, Grewal, & Kohli, 2015; Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004; Tsai & Thomas, 2011). With this key finding revealed, researchers began to apply it to the understanding of consumer responses to price discounts. For example, it was found that when the regular price was presented in a larger font than the discount price (Coulter & Coulter, 2005), or when the regular price was printed on the left of the display and the discount price was printed on the right (Biswas, Bhowmick, Guha, & Grewal, 2013), consumers perceived the discount magnitude as larger and evaluated the discounted...