The Influence of Product Context Complexity on Processing Fluency and Product Evaluation Across Shop Environments

Visual appeal is a pivotal feature in retail strategy. Consumers process the visual presentation of products based upon their ease of processing visual information. Similarly, consumers evaluate products depending on how they interpret the overlap between a target object and its context. Across two studies we demonstrate that product context complexity influences processing fluency and product evaluation. Further, we find that consumers process products high in con-text complexity less fluent in low congruent shop environments compared to high congruent shop environments. Relevant academic and managerial findings are discussed.