How does a photo holding a product move the needle in terms of that product's consumer perception? More than you'd think. Tod speaks to a researcher who studied this effect.
There are many advantages of e-commerce for the consumer — they can shop from home, it’s easier to compare products from different stores. But there’s always been one big disadvantage: They can’t touch anything. Sometimes, holding a product in your hand, is as much a part of the buying process as holding your credit card there.
But if we can’t give them a good feeling by letting them touch the product, can we get at least half-way there?
That’s what Andrea Luangrath set out to discover. She is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. She her colleagues have published a fascinating research study in the Journal of Marketing Research called “The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality.”
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Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.
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[00:00:00] Hello friends, it's Todd and I am currently out of the country on vacation.
[00:00:04] I'll be back Thursday, February 29th.
[00:00:07] So instead of a regular newscast type show, please enjoy this deep dive interview.
[00:00:13] There are many advantages of e-commerce for the consumer.
[00:00:16] They can shop from home.
[00:00:17] It's easier to compare products from different stores.
[00:00:20] But there's always been one big disadvantage.
[00:00:24] They can't touch anything. powerful tool for marketers. If you can get a consumer to touch a product in a store, they're significantly more likely to buy it. So in this work, we're looking at. So what is the effect of that vicarious touch? Well, and what marketing benefit? I mean, what needle, I guess, is what I'm asking. What needle is sort of moved by seeing a hand? Are consumers more
[00:03:00] willing to buy a product? Do they get a warm feeling about the brand? Do they consider the
[00:03:04] product to be more valuable? Like, what are the kinds of marketing benefits that marketers, you know, really lose sleep over sometimes, you know, and it's it's always been interesting to me that that small details like in your case, in the case of your study, having a hand there, having a hand touching it can make such a big difference. Is it enough to just show a hand in the product photo or does the hand need to be touching
[00:04:24] the product? a number of different experiments, we actually created our own custom virtual reality retail store. And we created different formats of this VR store for people to enter. So in our custom virtual reality store, we had a virtual hand reaching out and touching a product.
[00:05:40] And so we actually put people into these environments
[00:05:43] and then evaluated a lot of different things.
[00:05:46] We asked them about their indication of the extent to which this virtual environment is stimulating for you. And so this is, we're kind of leveraging prior work to use that as an indicator. All right, so you studied the difference between static GIF, video, VR. I don't think many folks as much as what the data says But if you had to you know, would if you were in Vegas and had to put 500 bucks down on it Where would you put your money? I guess more on the on the video side. Is that your gut feel? Maybe but actually I don't I don't even know that I would make that prediction
[00:08:20] And the reason is that the effect of touch
[00:09:25] flow for our newsletter automations. It let us get our team all contributing, including our ad agency people, and saved us a ton of time. And its new AI tool, which summarizes and clusters
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[00:09:38] with Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com slash podcast. people, reminding people that there are germs on hands. That you, and this is at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning, and we're testing this with people. And then we then, we then we show them an image or a video of them, of a hand touching a product and still it has these benefits for increasing product evaluations, for increasing
[00:11:04] willingness to pay.
[00:11:06] And this was very depictions of hands. We went so far as to testing this with a digitally created blue hand.
[00:12:20] So we literally created a disembodied blue hand
[00:12:24] that was reaching out and touching the product. your findings? The stickiness of them, the extent to which they persisted even in the face of attempts to turn them off. It also surprised me that we actually see this content so frequently and most of us probably don't even realize it. So in all of the Instagram,
[00:13:41] the thousands of Instagram posts that we get from conversation,
[00:15:02] like body language and facial expressions.
[00:15:05] And we translate those into text in different ways. be doing something natural with the product and meaningful. So if you create the touch to be something meaningless, like knocking on a cup, right? That's not a typical form of touch. It needs to be typical. It needs to be meaningful. And it needs to be in direct contact with the product.
[00:16:22] The rest of it, in terms of color or composition or spacing, I'll leave that to other experts