Engaging the senses online: three essays exploring the impact of sensory cues on consumer responses in a digital context

Abstract

This thesis includes three empirical essays on the sensory cues in a digital context. Essay 1 (Chapter 2) investigates the impact of vibrotactile feedback in smartphones on consumer responses. Consumers increasingly purchase through m-channels, including apps. Accordingly, marketers have enhanced immersive, sensorial aspects of m-channels, such as including vibrations while making in-app purchases. Given discrepant findings, it remains unclear whether adding such vibrotactile feedback affects consumer decision-making. The present research addresses: 1) Whether adding vibrotactile feedback influences consumers’ anticipated product satisfaction and purchase confidence, and 2) if so, how? Through an online pilot survey, two online experiments, and one lab experiment, this research finds that adding vibrotactile feedback to m-channels increases consumers’ anticipated product satisfaction, but not purchase confidence. Moreover, perceived ownership mediates this effect, because the vibrations offer a sense of control over the product during the purchase process. This research makes several contributions. First, it documents that control elicited via vibrations offers an alternative means to psychological ownership, as opposed to imagining touch. Second, it offers this haptic route as a means to achieve the stimulation motivation driving perceived ownership, different from prior visual routes. Third, it potentially reconciles literature conflicts regarding the effect of vibrotactile feedback on consumer decision-making. Essay 2 (Chapter 3) examines the effects of auditory stimuli on consumer taste perception through the lens of the Bouba/Kiki effect in short-video-based social media. Have you ever found yourself drooling while watching food videos on social media? Despite the absence of taste and a reliance primarily on sight and hearing, this reaction is not uncommon. Does this suggest that our sense of taste can be triggered by sound and vision? If so, how and why does this occur? Through one pilot study and four online experiments, this essay delves into taste transference on video-based social media platforms (e.g., TikTok) through the lens of the Bouba/Kiki effect. Initially, the essay establishes a novel visual-sound-taste matching model under the Bouba/Kiki effect, demonstrating that taste transference can indeed occur in a digital context. However, not all auditory stimuli yield identical results; Kiki music is more effective in inducing taste transference than Bouba music due to its ability to elicit a greater hedonic appraisal through enhanced taste perception. Furthermore, music familiarity and flavour type (sweet vs savoury) can moderate taste transference. This essay provides significant theoretical and practical contributions. Firstly, it proposes a unique classification of music into Bouba and Kiki categories, introducing an innovative expansion of the Bouba/Kiki effect. Secondly, it supports the notion that taste perception acts as a mediator in the relationship between music types and hedonic appraisal. Thirdly, it presents the novel idea that an individual’s familiarity with specific music can moderate taste perception, potentially reconciling the conflict in existing literature where some suggest familiarity is positive (e.g., Yeoh & North, 2010; Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2011) while others find the opposite (e.g., Maddi, 1968). Fourthly, it demonstrates that different flavour types can influence the relationship between music types and hedonic appraisal. From a practical standpoint, this essay recommends that vloggers and retailers strategically pair different flavours with specific types of music to enhance the consumer taste experience on social media. Essay 3 (Chapter 4) investigates how visual information entropy cues impact consumer responses in social media. Many brands post images on social media to engage consumers and embed purchase links to make it easier to buy. However, given the clutter on social media, identifying what makes some posts more engaging and persuasive has become a critical issue to address. This essay investigates how visual information entropy images (i.e., a quantitative measure that captures the amount of information transmitted by visuals) impact consumer responses in social media marketing. Comprising one field study and four online experiments, this essay consistently demonstrates that high information entropy images significantly boost engagement and ad persuasiveness in picture-based social media marketing. This is because high information entropy images are concrete (low construal level) representations and reflect psychological closeness. The field study initially evidences that high information entropy images can lead to increased engagement. The following four online experiments empirically evidence that customer inspiration mediates the effect of visual information entropy on ad persuasiveness. Implicit self-theories moderate the effect of visual information entropy levels on customer inspiration.

Incremental theorists respond with greater ad persuasiveness to high entropy visuals. This essay offers one methodological and five theoretical contributions. Methodologically, it develops and refines an algorithm to accurately compute the information entropy of images, thereby offering a quantifiable method to investigate the relationship between visual entropy and consumer responses. Theoretically, it first introduces information theory as a new perspective to empirically measure the information entropy of images in consumer behaviour research. Second, contrary to previous studies suggesting a preference for low-entropy images (Palmer et al., 2013), it supports that high information entropy images gain more engagement and lead to greater ad persuasiveness. Third, it reconciles conflicts in extant literature; some research suggests that information entropy may not predict construal levels (Biliciler et al., 2022), while other studies find the opposite (Carney, 2020). Fourth, it presents that colour images are more effective than black-and-white due to their higher information entropy levels. Fifth, it contributes to the existing literature on customer inspiration and implicit self-theories. This essay also provides practical implications for marketers, brands, and influencers.