O efeito do distanciamento psicológico e framing da mensagem sobre a capacidade de diferenciação em empresas de serviço

Abstract

The retail environment can be considered as a key attribute in the consumer decision process, and as a source of information or clues to the evaluation of consumers. Utility Theory suggests that, as well as larger assortments are preferred by consumers, environments described with a greater number of attributes could be perceived as offering more value and, therefore, could be better assessed. However, when we analyze the assessment of the environmental service by the Construal Level Theory (CLT) perspective, we realize that psychological distance will directly affect the consumer decision process. For example, when the decision takes place in a distant location or later in time, consumers construct them in a high level of abstraction. In this case, we can expect consumers to draw more attention on abstract attributes. The purpose of this dissertation was analyze how environments described with different amounts of attributes and with more concrete/abstract attributes would be assessed depending on consumers degree of psychological distance. Experiments were conducted with a total sample of 489 respondents, demonstrating that: a) Utility Theory can also be applied to different forms of communicating an environment and that those are affected by temporal distance. b) To use abstract attributes to describe the environments, the communication itself may have a higher effect on the construal level than the temporal distance. c) To compare different sets with concrete versus abstract items alters the effect of psychological distance on consumers choice.