The impact of analytical and intuitive appeals on the persuasiveness of e-commerce recommendations and the moderating roles of product type, involvement, and thinking styles

Abstract

Technological advancements have changed many aspects of our daily lives, with one of them being our shopping behavior, as more and more consumers are starting to rely on online retail. This move created a few new challenges to businesses, mainly in how they could adapt and still support the consumer through this different channel. To try to mitigate this issue, retailers introduced chatbots that not only can respond to any queries the consumer may have but are also able to push personalized recommendations. This dissertation intends to study how different types of appeals embedded in a recommendation message, describing the product’s features in either an intuitive or analytic manner, affect the persuasiveness of the recommendation. Moreover, I try to understand the moderating role that product type, level of involvement and consumers’ tendencies to rely more on an intuitive or analytic way of processing information, may play in this effect. The results of the experiment did not show support to the hypothesis that the type of appeal affects the persuasive power of the recommendation message, nor that product type or level of involvement play a moderating role. However, they did show a partial effect of matching the type of appeal with participant’s thinking style, meaning that messages with intuitive appeals were more persuasive for individuals that tended to rely on an intuitive way of processing information. Chatbot recommendation design should take these findings into account, although future studies should seek to clarify the existence of these results in a practical setting.

Date of Award	2 Feb 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Cristina Soares Pacheco Mendonça (Supervisor)