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Few studies illustrate how contextual effects (e.g. assimilation and contrast) in pay-per-click ad design may impact consumers' attitudes and purchase intention. To fill this research gap, the authors provide theoretical predictions and empirical evidence on how ad design may prompt an assimilation and/or a contrast effect that may influence consumers' attitudes toward the ad and the brand and purchase intention. They also investigate whether the impact of contextual effects on consumers' decisions depends on the level of vividness in the ad.

A 2 (vividness: dynamic motion vs. static page) × 2 (information design: assimilation vs. contrast) × 2 (aesthetic design: assimilation vs. contrast) between-subjects experimental design is used to examine the effects of vividness, information design and aesthetic design. Conditional process analysis is used to assess the mediating role of attitudes toward the ad and the brand in the relationship between contextual effects and purchase intention.

For dynamic ads (i.e. high vividness) but not for static ads (i.e. low vividness), combined information contrast and aesthetic contrast designs generate a more favorable attitude toward the brand and a higher purchase intention than do combined information assimilation and aesthetic assimilation designs. Notably, combined information contrast and aesthetic contrast designs have the strongest effects than any other combination of assimilation and contrast designs of information and aesthetics. Attitudes toward the ad and the brand are significant mediators between contextual factors and intention to purchase.

The study examines the effectiveness of online ads from a new theoretical angle based on the attributes of pay-per-click ads.

The results suggest that when advertisers decide to use dynamic ads, they should adopt a contrast design for both the ad information and its aesthetics.

This study fills a research gap in the contextual effects literature, including providing evidence of an underlying process in the relationship between certain contextual effects and purchase intent. It also extends previous findings of assimilation/contrast in information design to aesthetics design and advances the literature on vividness by examining a moderation effect of vividness.

The purpose of this study is to examine how consumer-brand engagement on social networking sites (SNS) is an outcome of the message orientation/vividness.

Message design is proposed to include two components, namely, orientation and vividness. The message orientation is classified as either task/instrumental or socioemotional. The message vividness is measured through content type. The consumer-brand engagement is conceptualized at three levels, namely, cognitive (comment), affective (shares) and conative (likes). A total of 1,000 posts were collected from the official Facebook pages of the 10 most popular travel brands, five each from India and the USA. These two countries were chosen as they are culturally different, with the former representing a largely collectivist culture and greater social connectivity and the latter representing primarily an individualistic culture.

The study reveals that greater message vividness, with more interactive/audio-visual content, leads to higher engagement. The task/instrumental message orientation leads to low-/medium-level engagement. Overall, a combination of high-vividness and socioemotional orientation generates maximum engagement. India and the USA depict unique effects of message orientations/vividness on the consumer-brand engagement levels, indicating cultural implications for the brand SNS messages – effectiveness.

The study’s conceptualization of consumer-brand engagement reflected through the consumers – responses to brands – SNS messages, represents new knowledge. The unique effects of message vividness and orientation on consumer-brand engagement and the variations across cultures is also a novel contribution to the extant branding literature.

The brand marketers should not only design their SNS messages with appropriate vividness/orientation but also tweak them across cultures, for maximum consumer engagement.

The study is a novel attempt to deploy the interaction process analysis framework in an SNS setting.

Retail marketers use brand communities (BCs) on social media (SM) to create digital engagement and reach new customers. However, this marketing form needs perceived content vividness and enduring involvement with products. The purpose of this study compares digital engagement (measured as an intention to recommend a retail brand online) produced by BCs of retailers at three levels of cognitive load (measured as exposure time to website).

Online quasi-experiments were conducted to analyze how SM platforms with diverse levels of enduring involvement with products, perceived content vividness and cognitive load influence digital engagement.

Results show enduring involvement with products produced digital engagement. In addition, cognitive load produced an inverted U-shaped effect on digital engagement in the condition of high content vividness (perceived). In the low content vividness condition, cognitive load produced similar or greater positive effects on digital engagement than those produced in the high content vividness condition.

The study implies a willingness to recommend online serves as a proxy of digital engagement failing to capture the reciprocal activities from the firms to customers. It also assumes that measuring product importance and usage frequency of the product serve as proxies of enduring involvement failing to capture the hedonic motivations related to products.

Practitioners should prioritize enduring involvement with products over perceived content vividness to improve digital engagement and reach new customers through their BCs on SM platforms. In addition, managers should use SM with content perceived with low vividness to improve digital engagement.

The study shows the influence of enduring involvement with products on digital engagement. It supports applying the resource-matching theory in SM platforms. It offers an alternative operationalization of constructs. The study compares multiple products and SM platforms providing empirical evidence of distinct levels of content vividness between SM platforms, not considered in previous studies.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual model to examine the effect of an augmented reality (AR)–based product display (vs a picture-based product display) on interactivity, vividness, website quality and consumer responses. In addition, the moderating role of the need for touch (NFT) in the effect of AR on media features is identified.

Hypotheses are tested using a one-factor between-subjects design for both a student sample (Study 1, N = 120) and a nonstudent sample (Study 2, N = 272). Data are analyzed using a series of analyses of variance, multivariate analyses of covariance and structural equation modeling.

Study 1 shows that an AR-based product display generates greater website quality, interactivity and vividness than a picture-based product display. Moreover, an AR-based product display improves interactivity and vividness only for high-NFT consumers; however, no significant difference emerged for low-NFT consumers. Study 2 replicates and extends our findings by identifying the specific processes that consumers go through when evaluating a website.

The current research advances the understanding of how product presentation technologies can attract customers with different haptic orientations and provides practical implications for online retailers interested in improving their customers' e-commerce experience.

The so-called vividness effect, painting a verbal picture to an audience and a key element of charismatic rhetoric, provides opportunities to make corporate communication more persuasive. The article seeks to provide evidence regarding: (1) the presence of the effect in written, international business communication and (2) whether vivid communication by top-level executives affects perception of their communication effectiveness.

The article employs a qualitative, exploratory setting (focus groups) to examine the attitude of participants towards vivid communication of top-executives. The article also employs a computer-aided-content-analysis (CATA) in two of the most important stock indices (Deutsche Aktienindex and Dow Jones) from 2011 to 2015 to locate the presence of the rhetorical style in annual reports. Lastly, the article studies via a quasi-experimental approach whether this type of communication is perceived differently on the dimensions of communication effectiveness by Segars and Kohut (2001) using unique 485 responses from recruited US-citizens.

The article reveals empirically that companies make use of this type of communication across stock indices. The results of the conformational, quasi-experimental study (Study 3) suggests that vividness is perceived differently by an audience. Therefore, positive attributional effects are not univocally related to communication effectiveness but to the dimensions responsibility and customer commitment. The participants also attribute other desirable characteristics towards the speaker, thereby providing evidence for a partial positive effect of vividness on communication effectiveness.

The article employs an established measure of communication effectiveness and combines it with a key communication style from academia and industry. In addition, the article combines several methods to examine the construct (mixed-models).

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of interactivity and vividness on perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment and their consequent impacts on consumer behavioral responses in a retail furniture VR store context. Considering the lack of VR empirical research, the indirect effect of interactivity and vividness on perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment through telepresence and the moderating effect of consumer previous experience with VR are also included.

A commercial IKEA VR store was chosen for the study. Head-mounted display (HMD) VR headsets were employed for the VR shopping experience. The study was conducted at a laboratory at a large university in the southeastern United States. A total of 146 college students participated in the study.

Vividness had significant positive effects on perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment, which in turn influenced attitude towards VR and behavioral intentions. Interactivity did not have positive impacts on perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. However, it indirectly affected perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment through telepresence. The findings also proved the moderating effect of consumer previous VR experience between interactivity and perceived usefulness and between interactivity and perceived enjoyment. The relationship between attitude and behavioral intentions was also positive.

Notwithstanding the benefits of VR in relation to its utilitarian, hedonic, and behavioral values, little is known about consumers' responses towards the usage of VR as a shopping tool. The present study can be considered as a starting point in understanding the usefulness of VR from consumer and managerial perspectives. The findings of VR indicated in the study will help practitioners understand the urgency of adopting VR in a retail setting.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse Facebook brand posts along dimensions of vividness, interactivity, novelty, brand consistency and content type and tests how these characteristics influence audience response in terms of liking and sharing brand posts.

The sample comprised 191 brand posts sourced from the Facebook brand pages of five top selling automotive brands in the UK. Audience response was operationalised using brand post likes and brand post shares, while brand post characteristics were operationalised according to relevant theory. Poisson regression models were tested to measure the effect of brand post characteristics on audience response.

The findings indicate that brand post vividness has a significant positive effect on brand post shares, but not on brand post likes. Brand post interactivity has a significant negative effect on both brand post likes and brand post shares. Brand post novelty and brand post consistency have a significant positive effect on both brand post likes and brand post shares. Finally, brand post content type has a significant positive effect on brand post likes, but not brand post shares.

The findings underscore the need for marketers to develop a systematic content strategy for Facebook brand pages. With this in mind, the study proposes several evidence based suggestions.

This study contributes to the literature first by synthesising and testing brand post characteristics that were overlooked in prior research and second by developing theoretically consistent operationalisation for already familiar brand post characteristics. These enhancements resulted in a final model with a superior explanatory power.

Leveraging marketer-generated content (MGC) can increase firms' success. However, few studies uncover the effects of MGC-related attributes on consumer engagement in the context of food marketing. This paper aims to explore the influence of MGC characteristics (valence, content types, vividness and interactivity) on consumer engagement.

This study uses WeChat official account data of seven food companies from China and conducts negative binomial regression models.

The findings indicate that different MGC-related characteristics have separate impacts on consumer WeChat engagement. Title valence, transactional title content and title with punctuation vividness negatively affect consumers' consuming engagement. Knowledgeable or entertaining title content and title with interactivity both positively affect consumers' consuming engagement. Moreover, transactional body text content negatively influences consumers' contributing engagement, whereas entertaining body text content shows positive effects. Vivid and interactive MGC body text attributes enhance consumers' contributing engagement behavior.

This study contributes to social media research in food marketplaces and sheds light on the effect of different WeChat MGC characteristics on separate consumer engagement.

A product colour plays an important role in consumers’ preferences. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the impact of the three-dimensional character of colour (brightness, saturation and vividness) on children’s behaviour towards a food product and as a source of well-being.

Two experiments were conducted. Study 1 was conducted with 62 children and used four visuals of syrup presenting two colours (red/green) and two variations of vividness (vivid/dim). Study 2 was conducted with 70 children and used four pictures of stewed apples and four pictures of pouches to test the influence of each dimension of colour on children’s preferences for the product and the product packaging.

Results show that the three-dimensional character of colour plays an important role in children’s gustatory inferences and well-being.

The study is restricted to one food product (in each study) habitually consumed by children. Other products could be investigated to show how colour can contribute to children’s well-being.

The paper addresses the issue of well-being as a potential brand-positioning element.

The paper suggests new avenues to use the brightness/saturation or vividness of a product or packaging colour as a potential element to arouse positive sensations that generate children’s well-being even when the product is not a preferred one.

This works initiates creative thinking concerning the impact of a product colour on children consumers.

This paper aims to examine how olfactory imagery, triggered by scent brand names prior to smelling, influences scented-product purchase intention.

Five studies were conducted. Logistic regression analysis was used to predict likelihood of olfactory imagery formation. ANOVA and t-test analyses were used for scent brand name group comparisons, and serial mediation analysis was used to test how scent brand names impact purchase intention through olfactory imagery vividness and the (dis)confirmation between imagined (i.e. expected) and experienced scents.

Scent name familiarity stimulates olfactory imagery formation. Scent brand name specificity (e.g. “Lavender Bouquet” vs. “Floral Bouquet”) influences purchase intention, with specific names leading to lower purchase intention, because they generate vivid olfactory imagery and induce a disconfirmation between imagined and experienced scents.

Branding scents on products should be a strategic product design decision. Surprisingly, although specific scent brand names trigger vivid olfactory imagery and precise scent expectations, they mitigate purchase intention and thus are riskier. General scent brand names are safer.

This research contributes by extending the literature on the effect of verbal cues on scent perception by considering the role of scent brand name specificity on purchase intent. It also adds to work on how olfactory imagery influences purchase intention by incorporating olfactory imagery vividness. Finally, it proposes and tests an underlying cognitive mechanism to explain the relationship between scent brand names and purchase intention.