With the implementation and promotion of the “Healthy China” strategy, health-related issues have received increasing attention from the corporate and academic communities. For health product enterprises, how to successfully attract the attention of consumers and effectively convey information to consumers is the key to the sustainable profitability of enterprises. The improvement of living standards also makes health the primary concern of personal life. However, existing researches have not examined how to promote health-related advertisements and what principles should be adhered to in the content presentation of health-related advertisements, and lack in-depth exploration of the mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Consumers’ acceptance of a health-related product（such as a fitness device）often depends on their perception of the effectiveness of the product（response efficacy）and the easiness to use of the product, that is, whether they can successfully complete the usage process（self-efficacy）. Based on the construal level theory, this research demonstrates that there is a match between the consumer perception and the individual information processing mode—high and low construal levels. Abstract, de-contextual, and goal-related high construal level makes individuals pay more attention to product response efficacy, while specific, contextual, and superficial low construal level makes individuals pay more attention to product self-efficacy. Through a series of studies, the matching of different levels of efficacy with construal levels and the theoretical mechanism behind them are explored and verified.

Study 1 examines the positive effect between the matching of low construal level and self-efficacy, and high construal level and response efficacy on fixation count and fixation duration by using eye movement tracking technique. In the selection frequency of advertising preferences, low construal level and self-efficacy（vs. response efficacy）advertisements are more frequently selected, and high construal level and response efficacy（vs. self-efficacy）advertisements are more frequently selected. Study 2 examines that the matching of low construal level and self-efficacy, and high construal level and response efficacy improve the persuasion of health-related advertisements by laboratory experiments, and again verifies the core hypothesis of this paper, as well as the robustness of the matching of construal level and efficacy. In Study 3, the possible theoretical mechanism behind the matching of construal level and efficacy is discussed. The research results show that the matching of low construal level and self-efficacy, and high construal level and response efficacy will improve individuals’ feeling right, and thus lead to stronger persuasive power of advertisements.

From the perspective of construal level and efficacy matching, this research explores and verifies the internal mechanism of persuasion of health-related advertising, which is of great theoretical significance. The research has important implications for health product enterprises in terms of their advertising design and content publicity.