Consumer Understanding and Use of Numeric Information in Product Claims

This paper visits the marketers’ assumption and investigates to what extent consumers understand and use numeric information presented in marketing communications. Study 1 demonstrated that less numerate individuals, compared to those higher in numeracy, were less sensitive to numeric information in their affective evaluations of products. Study 2 demonstrated that the majority of participants, especially less numerate individuals, were susceptible to the Illusion-of-Numeric-Truth effect. Study 3 demonstrated that less numerate participants were capable of being more sensitive to numeric information in product claims when they were encouraged to process numeric information more systematically through fluency manipulations.

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