The effect of emotion type and similarity of experience on consumers' willingness to pay for cause‐related products: Construal level perspective

Abstract Information complexity hinders consumer processing and reduces positive responses to cause‐related products. Previous studies on cause‐related marketing (CRM) have focused more on messaging effects on reducing information complexity, such as the presentation of the donation amount, cause description, and image displays. This study discusses the effect of construal fit on consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for products sold through CRM by focusing on the emotional and perceptual aspects of prior experiences. Notably, sadness has a low‐level construal fit with a high similarity of experience, whereas happiness has a high‐level construal fit with a low similarity of experience. Study 1 employs a between‐subjects design, examining how the construal fit influences WTP for cause‐related products. The results of Study 2 reveal that when consumers are in a sad (happy) emotional state, the higher (lower) they perceive the similarity of their experiences with the cause, the greater their WTP increases owing to processing fluency. Study 3 reconfirms the mediating roles of perceptual and conceptual fluency irrespective of text‐based and visual advertisements for CRM, thus showing the robustness of the construal fit effect on the enhancement of the two types of processing fluency across advertising contexts. These findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of the construal fit between emotional and perceptual experiences in enhancing processing fluency in CRM and suggest that marketers can create a teaser ad that induces either a sad or similar experience or a happy or less similar experience before introducing a CRM campaign.