Abstract
To gain a deeper understanding of consumers' brain responses during a real-time in-store exploration could help retailers to get much closer to costumers' experience. To our knowledge, this is the first time the specific role of touch has been investigated by means of a neuroscientific approach during consumer in-store experience within the field of sensory marketing. This study explores the presence of distinct cortical brain oscillations in consumers' brain while navigating a store that provides a high level of sensory arousal and being allowed or not to touch products. A 16-channel wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) was applied to 23 healthy participants (mean age = 24.57 years, SD = 3.54), with interest in cosmetics but naive about the store explored. Subjects were assigned to two experimental conditions based on the chance of touching or not touching the products. Cortical oscillations were explored by means of power spectral analysis of the following frequency bands: delta, theta, alpha, and beta. Results highlighted the presence of delta, theta, and beta bands within the frontal brain regions during both sensory conditions. The absence of touch was experienced as a lack of perception that needs cognitive control, as reflected by Delta and Theta band left activation, whereas a right increase of Beta band for touch condition was associated with sustained awareness on the sensory experience. Overall, EEG cortical oscillations' functional meaning could help highlight the neurophysiological implicit responses to tactile conditions and the importance of touch integration in consumers' experience.
Highlights
Aware that the consumer’s behavior is the complex result of a multifaceted interaction between the organism and its environment (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), customer experience has been defined as “the aggregate of feelings, perceptions and attitudes formed during the entire process of decision-making and consumption chain [. . . ] leading to cognitive, emotional, sensorial and behavioral responses” (Jain et al, 2017) and can be grounded in the theory of organism response by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), for which the consumer’s responses are determined by the interaction between stimulus and organism (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974)
The aim of our study is to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ neural activations related to emotional processing following exposure to certain sensory stimuli during an instore exploration and to answer the call for papers launched in recent years within the field of sensory marketing asking for more impactful research (Krishna, 2012)
To isolate different conditions of sensory fruition helped us to deepen the knowledge on the role of the sense of touch in consumers’ experience
Summary
Aware that the consumer’s behavior is the complex result of a multifaceted interaction between the organism and its environment (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), customer experience has been defined as “the aggregate of feelings, perceptions and attitudes formed during the entire process of decision-making and consumption chain [. . . ] leading to cognitive, emotional, sensorial and behavioral responses” (Jain et al, 2017) and can be grounded in the theory of organism response by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), for which the consumer’s responses (i.e., approach or avoidance) are determined by the interaction between stimulus and organism (i.e., consumer’s emotional state of pleasure, arousal, and dominance) (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974). To determine individual differences related to the specific need of touching products, before, a “Need For Touch” scale (Peck and Childers, 2003a,b) has been designed, and it includes two different dimensions: one more instrumental, and the other one related to the compulsive and emotional components of touch. These individual differences have been argued to influence the impact of humans touching products and products touching products (Krishna, 2012). Touch has widely been considered strictly related to emotion domain, given that physiologically, even skin surface is dedicated to the affective response coding (e.g., C Tactile nerve fibers; Spence and Gallace, 2011). Spence and Gallace (2011) argued that touch is likely to provide “a less noisy estimate of a product’s hedonic value” than other senses, and, it has been highlighted that touch is connected to information and feelings on a product through physical and psychological interactions (Hultén, 2011)
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