Is Creative Description Always Effective in Purchase Intention? The Construal Level Theory as a Moderating Effect

Abstract

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.