Simple or complex? Consumer response to display signs

Abstract

Retail signage provides information from the marketer to facilitate product purchase. An increase in sign information creates greater sign complexity, which raises the question: for consumer product choices, what quantity of information is helpful versus overwhelming? We hypothesize that consumers would allocate more visual attention to complex signs and that sign complexity would be a predictor of likeliness to buy (LTB). Five experts rated 105 real garden center signs for complexity and five low, moderate, and highcomplexity signs were selected for the study. Signs were incorporated into Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker software, where 85 non-student subjects rated sign attractiveness and LTB from a display containing that sign. Subjects allocated greater visual attention (higher fixation count and longer total fixation duration) to more complex signs, which were also rated as most attractive. Initial regression results showed sign attractiveness and fixation count were positive predictors of LTB, while complexity and total fixation duration were inversely related to LTB. Mediation analysis showed that fixation duration fully mediates fixation count impact on purchase intention. Results suggest that informationrich messaging in high complexity signs, while seen as attractive, may give consumers too much information and higher cognitive load, which makes decision-making more difficult.

Water Conserving Message Influences Purchasing Decision of Consumers

“…Furthermore, retail sign complexity influences visual attention. For example, study participants viewing garden center signs fixated more (by fixation counts) on signs with moderate visual complexity compared to low or high complexity signs, and had higher buy ratings [35]. This was perhaps explained by greater processing fluency of the moderate complexity signs (compared to highly complex signs), but containing more information compared to the low complexity signs, which contributed little to the purchase decision.…”

“…What goes unseen goes unsold, thus, the use of eye-tracking devices has become more commonplace in consumer research [30,[35][36][37]. Within a scene or display, areas of interest (AOIs) are identified, and visual metrics can be extracted by AOI.…”

How Consistent Are Consumers in Their Decisions? Investigation of Houseplant Purchasing

“…The rejection of H4 and H5 may provide indirect support for the hypotheses that external factors may influence decision consistency in plant purchases. Aspects of the product such as color, signage, viability of the plant, and other retail environmental cues may be “pushing” the product information into the consumer’s decision-making process and, as a result, be the solidifying factor of purchase intent consistency rather than aspects about the consumer themselves [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 11 , 38 ].…”

“…Yet, each purchase intention can be influenced by consumers’ degrees of certainty, and if this certainty outweighs the purchase intention, it can lead to a lost purchase. Previous research regarding plant purchases showed that factors influencing purchase intention include having a guarantee of the viability of the plant, price discounts, and clear, strategic signage [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. However, these are all examples of external influences on a purchase decision.…”

Location, Location, Location

“…When investigating the communication effectiveness of signage, there are numerous consumer responses that merit consideration, including attention (Kellaris & Machleit, 2016;Knuth et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2020), affective reaction (Kellaris et al, 2020), and trust (Isaac, 2020). In our research, we focus specifically on consumers' self-reported evaluation of signage, which we operationalize as their liking of the billboard.…”