Abstract
In marketing, the use of visual-art-based designs on products or packaging crucially impacts consumers’ decision-making when purchasing. While visual art in product packaging should be designed to induce consumer’s favorable evaluations, it should not evoke excessive affective arousal, because this may lead to the depletion of consumer’s cognitive resources. Thus, consumers may use heuristic decision-making and commit an inadvertent mistake while purchasing. Most existing studies on visual arts in marketing have focused on preference (i.e., affective valence) using subjective evaluations. To address this, we applied a neuroscientific measure, electroencephalogram (EEG) to increase experimental validity. Two successive tasks were designed to examine the effects of affective arousal and affective valence, evoked by visual artwork, on the consecutive cognitive decision-making. In task 1, to evaluate the effect of visual art, EEG of two independent groups of people was measured when they viewed abstract artwork. The abstract art of neoplasticism (AbNP) group (n = 20) was showing Mondrian’s artwork, while the abstract art of expressionism (AbEX) group (n = 18) viewed Kandinsky’s artwork. The neoplasticism movement strove to eliminate emotion in art and expressionism to express the feelings of the artist. Building on Gallese’s embodied simulation theory, AbNP and AbEX artworks were expected to induce lower and higher affect, respectively. In task 2, we investigated how the induced affect differentially influenced a succeeding cognitive Stroop task. We anticipated that the AbEX group would deplete more cognitive resources than AbNP group, based on capacity limitation theory. Significantly stronger affect was induced in the AbEX group in task 1 than in the AbNP group, especially in affective arousal. In task 2, the AbEX group showed a faster reaction time and higher error rate in the Stroop task. According to our hypotheses, the higher affective arousal state of the AbEX group might deplete more cognitive resources during task 1 and result in poorer performance in task 2 because affect impacted their cognitive resources. This is the first study using neuroscientific measures to prove that high affective arousal induced by visual arts on packaging may induce heuristic decision-making in consumers, thereby advancing our understanding of neuromarketing.
Highlights
The application of visual art-based designs to products or their packaging greatly impacts the purchase-related decision-making of consumers
In Task 2, we investigated the main effects of the responses, stimuli, and groups (AbNP vs. abstract art of expressionism (AbEX)) on RTand error rate (ErR) to test the impact of the differential affect induced in the two groups during task 1 on reaction time (RT) and ErR when performing the Stroop task
The results showed that observing AbEX increased affective arousal when compared with observing abstract art of neoplasticism (AbNP)
Summary
The application of visual art-based designs to products or their packaging greatly impacts the purchase-related decision-making of consumers. The phenomenon of “art infusion” (Hagtvedt and Patrick, 2008, 2011), whereby perceptions of visual art spill over onto an object with which the art is associated, has a favorable effect on the consumer product evaluation. When we appreciate a work of figurative art, besides deriving meaning, we may feel the affect expressed by the artist through the artwork (Uusitalo et al, 2012). This affective influence is grounded in embodied simulation theory, which posits that the emotions and sensations of the artist can be simulated within the visceromotor and somatosensory systems of the viewer (Gallese and Sinigaglia, 2011). Subsumed under the same label of abstract art, the neoplasticism movement, led by Mondrian, tried to eliminate emotion from art, whereas the expressionism movement, led by Kandinsky, insisted that art should express the feelings of the artist (Strickland and Boswell, 1992; Melcher and Bacci, 2013; van Paasschen et al, 2015)
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