Pre-Purchase Attribute Verifiability, Source Credibility, and Persuasion

Recent research has found that search and experience attribute claims are processed differently by consumers, with search attribute claims typically being more believable than experience attribute claims. It is, however, routinely the case that marketers desire to promote a product by making a claim featuring an experience attribute. The marketing literature has largely neglected the issue of how to enhance persuasion of experience attribute claims. The purpose of this research was to fill this void. We reason that source credibility impacts the receipt of experience claims and search claims differently and then report results of two experiments featuring two different types of sources in the context of two different categories which suggest that a source high in credibility can be employed to make experience claims more persuasive. The contributions our study makes to the persuasion literature and avenues for future research are discussed.