Difficulty Increases Purchase Intention

People's reasoning is often accompanied by subjective fluency experiences,including the difficulty of recalling certain information,generating certain ideas,and processing new information.These fluency experiences affect people's judgments and choices(Novemsky et al.2007).In general,most prior research demonstrates that feelings of high fluency improve product evaluation(Schwarz,2004,2008).In a departure from these findings,in the current paper we argue that low fluency can sometimes enhance evaluation of a product.This happens in the domain of luxury products.Because high fluency and non-luxury products lead to close psychological distance,low fluency and luxury products lead to distant psychological distance(Alter and Oppenheimer,2007),there is a fit between fluency and the luxury attributes of the product,which generates sense of feeling right and thus enhances product evaluation.In the current paper,we test these effects through four studies.Study 1 proves the interaction between fluency and product luxury attributes on product evaluation.Specifically,low fluency improves people's evaluation of luxury products,while high fluency improves people's evaluation of non-luxury products.Study 2 and Study 3 further demonstrate that the fit of psychological distance between fluency and product luxury attributes lead to the interaction.Study 4 demonstrates that the interaction between fluency and product luxury attributes on product evaluation is mediated by a sense of feeling right.The research expands the theoretical literature on fluency and luxury products,and also provides some new insights for marketers.