Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

impacts of message concreteness in conjunction with other potential communication tactics. Twostudies address this limitation and show that congruency between message concreteness andprimed temporal orientation (imagery processing mode) enhances message effectiveness. Theresults also uncover the processing mechanisms underlying the congruency effects, that is,processing fluency alone explains the congruency effect on behavioral intention, whereasprocessing fluency and flow jointly accounts for the congruency effect on attitude.MESSAGE CONCRETENESS: WHEN DOES THE PERSUASION PERSISTInvestigations of the effects of message strategies on persuasion have differentiated betweenabstract and concrete messages (Morgan and Reichert 1999; Lee, Keller and Sternthal 2010).Concrete messages employ familiar, tangible concepts that are easily linked to direct or indirectsensory-based experiences stored in memory (Morgan and Reichert 1999). Consider an antismokingwebsite that negatively frames cigarettes as "one weapon that kills from both ends." Thisweb advertisement seeks to convince consumers of the dangers of smoke through the use of aconcrete message. Abstract messages, on the other hand, employ more conceptual and lessimagistic concepts that facilitate relatively fewer connections to stored sensory-based images(McCabe 1988). Consider another anti-smoking web advertisement that uses ―infect truth,knowledge is contagious." Although most consumers have had direct experience with infections,mapping infection and contagion on truth and knowledge respectively is likely to activate fewermental imagery linkages. As such, "infect truth, knowledge is contagious" is a concrete message.Within a healthcare marketing context, both abstract and concrete messages appear to holdpromise for enhancing the effectiveness of communications. Under a broader marketingcommunication context, message concreteness is often considered one of the central issues indeveloping persuasive messages (Lee, Keller and Sternthal 2010). Recognizing the importance ofthis subject, a large body of literature have examined the processing and persuasiveness ofconcrete versus abstract messages (e.g., Petrova and Cialdini 2005; Sherman et al. 1985). Morerecently, Lee, Keller and Sternthal (2010) have examined the effect of fit between messageconcreteness and an individual‘s regulatory orientation on consumer attitude.While these investigations provide a meaningful foundation for effective use of concrete versusabstract messages in persuasive communications .Some issues need further study. First, thepersuasive impacts of the congruency between concreteness and other communication tacticsparticularly important to persuasive healthful communication, such as primed temporal goalorientation (Bergadaa 1990) have yet to be established. Second, although prior research hasidentified the cognitive pathways through which the congruency effects occur, e.g., processingfluency (Aaker and Lee 2006) or engagement (Lee, Keller and Sternthal 2010), the theoreticalcomplexity of these pathways remains under-explored.Our research seeks to address these issues and thereby build a more complete nomological netregarding the effective use of message concreteness in marketing communications and in healthrelatedpromotion. To this end, we report on two experiments that examine the impact of concreteversus abstract messages on processing of a persuasive anti-smoking website. In study 1, we testhypotheses predicting persuasive enhancement associated with congruency between concreteversus abstract message and primed temporal orientation. We also examined the underlyingpathways for the congruency effects on attitude and behavioral intention. Study 2 seeks tovalidate the persuasive effects and cognitive pathways identified in study 1, when congruencyeffects are operationalized differently. Specifically, we examine the congruency effects betweenmessage concreteness and processing instructions. The conceptual framework is provided infigure 1. We continue on reviewing the literature on the focal constructs and discussing thetheoretical development of the hypotheses to be tested in study 1