Manipulating Temporal Cues and Message Concreteness for Deal Communication

Online merchants often use social media to communicate deal messages to directed consumers, but they face the fundamental challenge of how to effectively communicate deal messages to these consumers using that medium. This research seeks to address this challenge by building on the construal level theory to theorize that consumers' purchase intentions in response to the products promoted via social media communication are affected by the concreteness of promotion messages and its interaction with message promotional time and deal expiration time. A between-subject experiment was conducted, and the findings suggest that concrete messages lead to higher purchase intentions. Through interacting message concreteness, message promotional time and deal expiration time, we show that the congruency of a concrete message with either, but not both, temporal cue lead to higher purchase intention. This study thus provides theoretically grounded insights on how to better communicate deal information on microblogging sites.