Leveraging mental imagery to create an enhanced online shopping experience

Abstract

Online shopping takes on an ever-increasing role in the current retail environment. In 2029 retail e-commerce sales are estimated to exceed 6.4 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide, which would signify a nearly threefold increase in e-commerce revenue over 10 years (Statista, 2024). However, consumers face the challenge of not being able to physically touch and test products before making a purchase. This limitation in tangible product experience can lead to uncertainty and hesitation (Kim & Krishnan, 2015). This issue is particularly pronounced in the beauty and personal care sector, where the tactile qualities of products are critical to consumer satisfaction. Lacking the technologies to engage the other senses, webshops still mainly rely on visual information. To compensate for the lack of physical interaction opportunities, our research examines whether we can leverage consumers’ own resources, more specifically mental imagery. By encouraging consumers to imagine how a product would feel and function, we seek to replicate a physical store’s comprehensive sensory information, where consumers can touch, feel, and test products before purchasing. Eliciting mental imagery has been used as a persuasive communication strategy for years. Especially in advertising, consumers are often encouraged to imagine the use of the product, leading to better product evaluation, stronger product desire, and greater purchase intentions (Krishna et al., 2016; Elder & Krishna, 2012). Two types of mental sensory imagery can be distinguished: deliberate (i.e. consumers being instructed to form an image) and automatic mental imagery (i.e. more spontaneous imagination, for example, by reading a description). The effects of both types of imagery have so far mostly been studied in isolation (Elder & Krishna, 2022). Our research compares the efficacy of evoking automatic versus deliberate mental imagery, which is particularly relevant as most webshops only use vivid images (i.e. a form of the automatic imagery evoking technique). By exploring the option of instructing consumers to imagine, we aim to ascertain potential enhancements beyond the current standard in online retail (Bleier et al., 2019).