The Study Of Consumer Virtual Haptic: Causes And Outcomes

What is the role of touch in consumer behavior? In marketing, researchers examine interpersonal touch and find that it affects both attitudes and behavior, so does it on the relationship between consumers and products. However, internet provides consumers with more extensive products and more convenient shopping, simultaneously it deprives the haptic experience for decision making in consumer's purchase, which induce the flourishing e-commerce to be confronted with the great challenge. Recently, more and more researchers take their focus on absence of consumer's haptic experience, and discus the compensation effect for haptic information from different point of view, whereas much of these researches are separate and tuneless, especially lacking the discussion and empirical research on compensation mechanism of consumers'haptic.Because of the intangibility dilemma of managerial practice and absence of empirical researches, based on the related literature, a cause model of consumer's virtual haptic is constructed which explains the cognition mechanism of consumer's haptic compensation effect. This dissertation follows with three tasks.Firstly, based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm, virtual presence theories and multi-sensory interaction and integration theory, the consumer's virtual haptic process model of this dissertation is constructed and empirically tested. The results show that, virtual presence makes a positive influence on product visualization and arualization, whereas virtual presence doesn't affect virtual haptic, simultaneously product visualization and arualization makes a positive influence on virtual haptic.Secondly, based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm and website quality theory, antecedents and moderator variables of consumers'virtual haptic is identified and empirically tested. The results show that, website Interactivity, website vividness and website ease of use make a positive effect on virtual presence, simultaneously consumer's imagery ability positively moderate the relationship between website Interactivity and virtual presence, website vividness and virtual presence, website ease of use and virtual presence. Furthermore, website safety doesn't affect the virtual presence, but after entering the moderator variable of imagery ability, website safety negatively affect consumer's virtual presence.Thirdly, based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm and related literature, virtual haptic's influence on consumer's online shopping attitude is experimentally tested. The results show that, virtual haptic has positive effect on product quality evaluation and decision confidence, and negative effect on consumer's touch intention. Simultaneously, consumer's need of touch positive moderate the relationship between virtual haptic and product quality evaluation, virtual haptic and decision confidence, virtual haptic and consumer's touch intention.The contributions of this dissertation are as follows. Firstly, on account of online shopping situation, this dissertation carefully distinguishes the difference between kinesthesia and haptic in information processing. Thus this dissertation constructs and empirically tests how virtual presence affects consumer virtual haptic through product visualization and arualization, as which extends virtual presence theories in cognition psychology.Secondly, on account of online shopping situation, this dissertation identifies and empirically tests that website quality is the important antecedents of consumer virtual haptic, and consumer imagery ability is the moderator in this relationship. Hence this dissertation fills up the shortage of researches on consumer virtual haptic influence variables.Thirdly, on account of online shopping situation, this dissertation tests how virtual haptic influences consumer online shopping attitude, and finds out the moderating effect of consumer need of touch on this relationship. Hence this dissertation establishes the meaning of virtual haptic in internet marketing, and enriches the internet marketing.