Prepurchase Attribute Verifiability, Source Credibility, and Persuasion

By Shailendra P. Jain, Steven S. Posavac. 2001

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent research has found that search and experience attribute claims are processed differently by consumers, with search attribute claims typically being more believable than experience attribute claims. It is, however, routinely the case that marketers desire to promote a product by making a claim featuring an experience attribute. The marketing literature has largely neglected the issue of how to enhance persuasion of experience attribute claims. The purpose of this research was to fill this void. We reason that source credibility impacts the receipt of experience claims and search claims differently and then report results of two experiments featuring two different types of sources in the context of two different categories which suggest that a source high in credibility can be employed to make experience claims more persuasive. The contributions our study makes to the persuasion literature and avenues for future research are discussed.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0acca52dfbd13d56b4d7796e96ad7421ca7a4705

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. Kwok Kee Wei
2. Mario Pandelaere
3. Siegfried P. Gudergan
4. Liselot Hudders
5. Ralf Wilden

In Marketing

1. Chuan-Hoo Tan
2. Kwok Kee Wei
3. Pradeep Racherla
4. Meng-Xiang Li
5. Liqiang Huang
6. Mario Pandelaere
7. Ian Lings
8. Wesley Friske

Citations in the corpus

• Perceived 'usefulness' of online consumer reviews: An exploratory investigation across three services categories (2012, background): “Therefore, it can be assumed that the informational attributes of the reviews may play a more important role than source characteristics in affecting perceived usefulness (Jain and Posavac 2001).”
• Helpfulness of Online Product Reviews as Seen by Consumers: Source and Content Features (2013, background): “Perceived source credibility refers to the credibility of the authors’ review information as perceived by the consumers [37].”
• Employer branding: strategic implications for staff recruitment (2010, background): “Research in consumer theory has shown that the credibility of experience claims can be increased when the claim is stated by a highly credible source (Jain & Posavac, 2001).”
• Consumer search for information in the digital age: An empirical study of prepurchase search for automobiles (2003, background): “However, given that source credibility is more important for experience attributes than for search attributes (Jain & Posovac, 2001), we might expect that the credibility of Internet sources will be critical to how they are used.”
• The Silver Lining of Materialism: The Impact of Luxury Consumption on Subjective Well-Being (2012, background): “In addition, consumers often form expectations about the quality of the brand even before consuming this brand, based on extrinsic characteristics such as price information or brand name (Jain and Posavac 2001).”