Abstract

Premium pricing is based on inferring high quality from the high price of a product, and often emphasizes the scarcity of the product. This study focused on verifying the effect of the production causes of limited products on the purchase intention of premium-priced products through a series of experiments. First, Experiment 1 classified limited production causes into scarce materials (i.e., material conditions) and difficult production processes (i.e., process conditions), and verified the effect of the level of fluency in processing advertisement messages (low vs. high) on purchase intention. As a result of Experiment 1, scarce material conditions had higher purchase intention than process conditions only under conditions with high treatment fluency. This can be seen as a result of the fact that price-quality heuristics are more easily induced when the processing fluency is high, and the material is more intuitive than the process. However, in the case of process conditions, the low processing fluency conditions had higher purchase intention than the high conditions. This is because the lower the fluency, the more higher the thinking is required in the process, which may be due to the effect of inferring the effort of the producer with high quality. Experiment 2 was conducted to verify this. As a result of dividing the process conditions into complexity (i.e., feasibility) and effort (desirability), the effort conditions had higher quality perception and higher purchase intention than complexity conditions. The implications of this study are as follows. First, the processing fluency of advertising messages that emphasize the scarcity of materials should be high. Second, a message that emphasizes the effort and sincerity spent in the production process is more effective than the difficulty of the production process.