CONSUMER CURIOSITY, ANTICIPATION, AND CLICK-THROUGH: NEURAL SIGNATURES OF DIGITAL BUZZ

Abstract

Digital and social media has become an indispensable channel of promotion and marketing to the enterprises. For example, compared to other means of promotional channels, such as television advertising, newspapers, social network services (SNS) are more competitive, more convenient, and lower-cost. Because individuals compose or share those posts anytime, anywhere, information spreads fast and wide on social media. SNS posts can affect people's perception, thus affecting their purchase intention and behavior. A large number of researchers investigated academic issues involved SNS, such as the influence of eWOM in social media on consumers' purchase intentions (Erkan & Evans, 2016). According to Lin and Lu’s research (2011), which suggests that gender difference also exists in social media. In addition, a study identified attributes of social media messaging activities and examined the relationships among those perceived activities, value equity, relationship equity, brand equity, customer equity, and purchase intention through a structural equation model (Kim & Ko, 2012). In this study, we focus on the motivational antecedents of digital buzz on digital and social media. Among many performance metrics of digital marketing, the most important one that really matters to advertisers is click-through. Click-through is believed to reflect viewers’ interest in the product contents that are being shown on screen, and based on that assumption, it opens a new navigation tab, such as the advertiser’s web site that can provide information about products and services of an advertising company. However, there is a caveat here. Since advertisements in digital and social media are often placed on top of the contents that the viewers have already been reading, viewers can accidentally click on the internet advertisements in which they have no interests. Viewers are only annoyed by intrusive re-routing during their digital activities. Hence, it is important that the digital media marketer to be able to distinguish between the click-throughs, knowing the difference between the clicks that are genuinely reflective of a viewer’s interest, or the rest of clicks that are not. For this purpose, we propose consumer curiosity and anticipation as drivers of click-through that are meaningful to digital markers. Consumer curiosity is an important variable that results in click-through behavior, digital propagation or buzz, and further stimulates consumers' consumption activities. In recent years, there are many studies to verify this theory. Online atmospherics have an impact on customer emotions, and perceptual curiosity has a moderating effect existed in the two variables (Koo & Ju, 2010). However, the research about curiosity’s mediation effect on purchase intention aroused by SNS contents is still limited. In addition, the neural research in this field is still limited. The research seeks to understand how the SNS contents affect customer’s curiosity toward the product which the content mentioned. Furthermore, to find the relationship between curiosity and the purchase intention by using neuromarketing methodology. Our goal is to discover the neural signatures of consumers’ motivational state that leads to click-through, exploration of contents, and finally digital buzz behavior. EEG and fMRI are commonly research approaches used in the neuroscience field. EEG detect electric activities in the brain waves and fMRI measures hemodynamic events to discover individuals’ cognitive and motivational states. After content-analyzing top 10 most shared posts in the fashion brands Facebook official account which included luxury brands such as GUCCI, Luis Vuitton, and Hermes), we extract the attractive posts’ content attributes to be the level of accuracy, graphic quality, and information value. Then, we create two different simulations of social media activities that instigates viewer curiosity at differing levels. By designing an online experiment that examines how different arrays of information can create different levels viewer curiosity in user posts, and by measuring viewers’ intention to propagate the posts, we are able to discover neural signatures of digital buzz. Potential implications to digital marketing of this research in establishing meaningful performance metrics for digital marketing are discussed.