Ever After: A Price Story: An Investigation of Afterlife Salience and Willingness to Pay

摘要

From time to time, the prospect of afterlife is made salient, e.g., when attending a Sunday church service, or through exposure to certain media programs. How would a reminder of afterlife affect purchase behavior such as consumers' willingness to pay? Through what mechanism? Can afterlife salience's effect be simply interpreted as a mortality salience effect? We believe the notion of afterlife is critically different than that of mortality and propose Construal Level Theory as the explanation of afterlife salience's impact on consumers' willingness to pay. When evaluating a product, abstract construals pertain to the benefits of a product, whereas concrete construals relate to the costs of purchase and consumption. As a supernatural phenomenon, afterlife is something that one has no concrete knowledge or experience of. Afterlife is also more temporally distant than any other life events. The salience of afterlife would thus give rise to a more abstract construal in a product purchase context, which would translate to a greater emphasis on the benefits of a potential buy. For a quality product that provides excellent benefits, a greater emphasis on product benefits would lead to higher perceived value and thereby a higher price that consumers may be willing to pay.