Coming to your senses : there's more to product experience than meets the eye.

Abstract

Our senses are the first gateway to our perception of the world. Information gleaned from the various senses is integrated to generate a holistic human experience. A great deal of research has found vision to dominate and guide the human experience more so than any other senses. However, the emergence of touch as an important sense in consumer behaviour seems to indicate that vision’s importance in certain domains of human experience might have been previously overestimated.

The current study seeks to investigate the influence of vision and touch on consumer behaviour, particularly on product evaluation and purchase intention. An experiment was conducted to study the effects of these two senses on two product categories, namely casual female top and female underwear.

Results from our study reveal that vision may not necessary dominate all product experience and that touch is paramount to consumers’ product evaluation and purchase intention, especially for casual female tops and female underwears. Moreover, a casual female top has to be both visually appealing and haptically appealing in order to stimulate high purchase intention. These findings raise doubts about the effectiveness of Internet retailing and increase the urgency for more research to investigate the extent of the impact of the unavailability of touch in the online medium.