The Effects of Visual Context on Construal Level in Online Shopping: An Abstract

Abstract

When shopping online, consumers can’t be as certain of the characteristics or quality of what they’re buying as they would be when shopping in a retail store. This uncertainty is often due to a lack of visual information about the product, which can lead consumers to be less likely to make a purchase.

To help alleviate this uncertainty, online retailers typically present pictures of the product on their website. However, these pictures often display the product without any product-relevant context, i.e., displaying an office chair against a simple white background instead of in an office environment. A lack of product-relevant context adds to consumers’ uncertainty due to a lack of visual information with which to evaluate the product. Displaying the product in a relevant visual context can help reduce the perceived risk associated with purchasing the product.

In addition to perceived risk, perceived quality is also an important determinant of consumers’ online purchase intentions. Intrinsic product cues such as durability, comfort, and style are difficult to evaluate online. Zeithaml (1988) suggests that when intrinsic cues are difficult to evaluate, consumers will likely rely more on extrinsic cues, such as price, brand name, and rating, to infer quality. The author proposes that a visual product-relevant context is an extrinsic cue that consumers can use to infer quality and will increase perceived quality vs. those products that have no visual product-relevant context.

Providing visual product-relevant contexts may also promote consumers to higher-order thinking. In an online shopping scenario, visual product-relevant contexts can help show why a consumer should buy a product by showing what it would be like to own the product or what benefits it would provide them. Such a perspective is indicative of a higher-level construal, which people generally take when thinking about the outcomes of their actions (Trope and Liberman 2010). Alternatively, depicting the product using greater details may nudge consumers toward a lower level construal of the product as more of consumers’ attention will be brought to the peripheral rather than the central features of a product. Promoting either a high or low construal can change whether they use price to infer quality or monetary sacrifice (Borneman and Homburg 2011). The author proposes to study whether visual context promotes high- or low-level construal using an adaptation of the implicit association test (Lee et al. 2014).