Abstract

This study focuses on the membership, where the value is somewhat ambiguous and can be perceived differently depending on the act of the consumers, and suggests a strategy to increase the intention to join the membership by presenting different subject of advertisement message. To conform this, Study 1 was designed by 2(message subject: user vs. service) between-subjects factor, and measured the intention to join the membership. Specifically, study 1 conformed that when the message subject was presented as a user, compared to presented as a service, social inference was activated and the perceived ‘idiosyncratic fit’ that one believed s/he would get more benefit than other members increased, resulting in a higher intention to join. Further in study 2, to clarify the effect of idiosyncratic fit, we lowered the benefit of the membership service and examined whether the message subject could affect the intention to join through the perceived idiosyncratic fit when the benefit inference is restrained. Two experiments were conducted to uncover that the inference which consumers themselves can benefit relatively more than other users was important, not simply the high perception of benefit offered by the membership service. These findings suggest that when there is no enough information to judge the value of the membership service, increasing the perception of idiosyncratic fit can be the useful method, and the perceived idiosyncratic fit depends on how to describe the subject of advertisement or persuasive message. And these imply the advertisement message is more effective when the subject is user or consumer rather than when it is service or company.