Fill Up Your Senses: A Theory of Self-Worth Restoration through High-Intensity Sensory Consumption

Perceived Severity of COVID-19 and Post-pandemic Consumption Willingness: The Roles of Boredom and Sensation-Seeking

“…People’s increased boredom from limited activities and sensation-seeking expressions during the pandemic gave us good reason to speculate that people’s willingness to consume and impulsive buying tendencies may climb significantly after the pandemic is effectively controlled. By satisfying an individual’s needs through payment, consumption is an effective means to elevate arousal levels ( Batra and Ghoshal, 2017 ; Koles et al, 2018 ). Yan et al (2016) demonstrated that individuals’ willingness to consume would greatly increase if they try to seek external stimuli to enhance their arousal.…”

Similar or contrastive? Impact of product–background color combination on consumers' product evaluations

“…During this process, consumers usually engage in rational thinking and focus on processing the functional product to help them make reasonable and correct decisions (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982; To, Liao, & Lin, 2007). If a product–background contrastive color combination is used for functional product, the strong contrast between product color and background color will distract consumers' attention from the focal product (Batra & Ghoshal, 2018). It thus hinders the thoughtful, deliberate process on core information, then negatively affects consumers' evaluation on functional products.…”

“…Arousal has been defined as an unconscious, instinctive response, a motivational state ranging from a continuum of drowsiness, in which one feels soporific, to extreme alertness, in which one feels energized (Mandler, 1982; Muro & Murray, 2012; Noseworthy, Muro, & Murray, 2014). Arousal can function as an additive effect derived from an object's psychophysical properties (e.g., intensity, pitch, hue, brightness), novelty properties and survival properties (e.g., health, threats, and fear; Batra & Ghoshal, 2018). As an important and common psychophysical property, color have a significant influence on consumers' arousal level, the diversity and complexity of color can also lead to different arousal levels (Berlyne & Daniel, 1960; Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994).…”

“…Therefore, compared with product–background similar color combination, product–background contrastive color combination can cause higher arousal level. Arousal is often accompanied by change in individual information processing capability and methods (Batra & Ghoshal, 2018; Berlyne & Daniel, 1960), such that high‐arousal state may be distracting, creating interference in processing capability, this interference will reduce the dimension of cognitive representation of objects and diminishes the reliance on cues that are cognitively demanding (Pham & Tuan, 1996), which in turn encourages simpler response strategies (Bodenhausen, 1993). However, consumers' attention will not be distracted at low arousal level, which will enhance consumers' fluent process on information (Paulhus & Lim, 1994).…”

“…For sensory‐social products, product–background contrastive color combination will bring consumers higher arousal level. Higher arousal level has been shown to lead to the dominance of automatic, affective processes over thoughtful, cognitive ones, make consumers adopt a simpler and more direct response strategy (Batra & Ghoshal, 2018; Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). Dealing with sensory‐social products, consumers will attach importance to their intuitive feelings when pursuing sensory experience (Schulze, Schöler, & Skiera, 2014), and to their affective judgments when evaluating social expression needs (Bottomley & Doyle, 2006).…”