Friday Research: Take Driver's Seat to Impress Your Online Shopper

When Will You Use This?  

Developing your website and creating a better online experience for your customers.

What’s The Red-Letter Bite Today? 

In recent years the Internet has become the main channel for consumers in search for products and services. However, the field of online retailing needs more investigation to understand what’s really significant in this new virtual environment.

Current research* uses pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) model, seeking to extend existing knowledge about consumers’ activities in online retail environments by focusing on the largely ignored role of perceived dominance. If you don't know much about PAD, the original model was created by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) and it suggests that the organism response reflects the individual‘s emotional states. All emotional reactions to an environment can be categorized into 3 dimensions: pleasure, arousal, and dominance (shortly, PAD). Pleasure-displeasure dimension refers to the degree to which an individual feels happy, satisfied, pleased with the situation; arousal-unarousal dimension refers to the degree to which an individual feels stimulated, excited, energetic in the situation; dominance-submissiveness dimension refers to the degree to which an individual feels control over or free to act in the situation.

It is revealed that perceived dominance or influence over oneself has direct effects on purchasing intentions, as well as indirect impacts through pleasure. The impact of perceived dominance on pleasure also is moderated by situational involvement. Moreover, whereas high task-relevant cues exert significant effects on perceived dominance, low task-relevant cues influence arousal.

Will She Respond to Website Atmosphere as to Real Life?

Addition To Your Bag of Tricks    

This research shares a few insights to help you develop a better online experience for your customers and of course, get more conversions. The results reveal the significant effect of high task-relevant cues on dominance, meaning, tasks that are directly related to shopping goals (verbal website content, pictures of products, navigation aids, etc) should help your customer feel totally informed and confident to make the right decision, your website should radiate power and soft authority to influence the shopper.

Moreover, this study found that low task-relevant cues have an effect on arousal, which means that such website elements as colors, background patterns, fonts, icons, music, etc should arouse, stimulate and excite your customers in order to influence their shopping behaviour.

  

*Jung-Kuei Hsieh, Yi-Ching Hsieh, Hung-Chang Chiu, Ya-Ru Yang,"Customer Response to Web Site Atmospherics: Task-relevant Cues, Situational Involvement and PAD" Journal of Interactive Marketing, August 2014 {Thanks for the material}

P.S. When you’re done reading, I’d love for you to share your experience with creating great online experience for your customers? Leave a comment or Tweet me, let's chat!

P.P.S. Need some help on crafting your marketing message? Let's do this together.