Product Touch and Consumers’ Online and Offline Buying: The Role of Mental Representation

2017AbstractAs offline retailers struggle to compete with online ones, the importance of a consumer’s ability to touch a product prior to purchase becomesimportant to study. Prior research has found inconsistent results on whether product touch facilitates consumers’ product-related decision making.Some studies report a positive effect, whereas others do not. The current research reconciles this inconsistency and draws retailing implications.Across three experiments, we show that the effect of product touch on consumers’ purchase intentions and willingness to pay for a product beingevaluated is evident when consumers’ mental representation of the product is concrete, but not when abstract. We further show that perceivedrisk and perceived ownership simultaneously mediate this moderating effect of mental representation. Implications are drawn for both offline andonline retailers.

2017年摘要 随着线下零售商努力与线上零售商竞争，消费者在购买前触摸产品的能力的重要性成为重要的研究课题。先前的研究在产品触摸是否有助于消费者做出与产品相关的决策方面发现了不一致的结果。一些研究报告了积极的影响，而其他研究则没有。当前的研究调和了这种不一致，并得出了对零售业的启示。 通过三个实验，我们表明当消费者对产品的心理表征是具体的时，产品触摸对消费者的购买意愿以及为被评估产品支付的意愿的影响是明显的，但当心理表征是抽象的时则不然。我们进一步表明，感知风险和感知所有权同时调节了这种心理表征的调节作用。对线下和线上零售商都有启示。