176 Does Left-Right Matter? Effects of Product-Price Left-Right Placement and Construal Level on Product Evaluation the opposite. Such people tend to consider prices as indicative of quality. CLT suggests that considerations related to the core benefits of a product prevail in the psychologically distant perspective (Bornemann and Homburg, 2011). When people with high level of construals (“high-level construals”) see the price displayed to the left of the product, they interpret the placement as an indication that the product’s benefits are high. Thus, we expect that, for such people, a “price-left product-right” placement will increase the perceived quality of the product, resulting in a more favorable product evaluation. We propose that perceived product quality is the underlying mechanism that explains the interaction effect between product-price/left-right positions and construal levels. Product quality judgements are commonly considered as inferences regarding an unobservable dimension based on observable product features, and represent the “goodness” of a product (Yan and Sengupta, 2011). In the current study, people with lowlevel (high-level) construals are expected to infer from an ad with the “price-left, productright” (“price-right, product-left”) position that the product is to be perceived asof good quality. And such inferences lead to more favorable product evaluations. To examine aforementioned propositions, we have conducted two pretests and four experiments. The first pretest uses eye tracking to confirm that the reading patterns of people in Taiwan are generally left-to-right based. The second pretest indicates that the left-to-right reading patterns also occurred in ad viewing. Specifically, participants who saw the “price-left, product-right” ads show a stronger sense of anticipatory pain than those who saw the “product-left, price-right” ads, when their construal levels are not considered. In Experiment 1, we manipulate the construal level through a priming task. We ask participants to read an article which focuses on either “how” (low-level construal) or “why” (high-level construal). We then present participants with a photo image of a bulletin board. The results indicate that when being primed with low-level construal, participants who saw the bulletin board with the “product-left, price-right” placement perceive the product value higher than those who saw the same bulletin board but with the “price-left, product-right” placement. Perceived quality is observed to be the mediator. We further conduct experiments 2, 3, and 4 to enhance the robustness of the above results by employing different manipulations of the construal level, advertising presentation, and dependent measures. In Experiment 2, we manipulate the construal level through a time window, namely, discount that expires in three days (low-level construal) vs. discount that expires in three weeks (high-level construal). We present the advertising
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