The Priming Effect of Price Display and Banner Advertising on Online Consumers’ Price Sensitivity

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. August 2020. Major: Design, Housing and Apparel. Advisor: Hye-Young Kim. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 157 pages.This study drew from priming literature to explore under-investigated factors that contribute to online consumers’ price sensitivity and the subsequent brand interest. Specifically, it examined how being exposed to price cues on brand websites makes it easier to retrieve the price concept in a subsequent task (increased fluency), which in turn results in a higher valuation of the price attribute (higher price importance). Three pretests were conducted to develop the visual stimuli that were used in the main study and for the manipulation check of each variable. In the main study, participants were assigned to one of the conditions in a 3 (price cue: no price cue vs. small price cue vs. large price cue) x 2 (awareness: aware vs. unaware) x 2 (luxuriousness: mass vs. luxury) between-subjects study design and were exposed to the corresponding image of a mock retail website. A 3x2x2 ANOVA and a simple mediation analysis were conducted to examine each part of the conceptual model, and the entire model was tested using a moderated serial mediation. The results suggest that presenting the price of the product under examination (a price cue in the aware condition), compared to not presenting the price, increased the accessibility of the price concept, resulting in higher price sensitivity. In contrast, presenting a banner advertisement with the price of an irrelevant product (a price cue in the unaware condition), compared to presenting a banner advertisement without the price, decreased the accessibility of the price concept, resulting in lower price sensitivity. The lower price sensitivity led to higher brand interest. Implications of these results were discussed in the context of other studies