The Impact of Visual Art and High Affective Arousal on Heuristic Decision-Making in Consumers

Abstract

In marketing, the use of visual-art-based designs on products or packaging crucially impacts consumers’ decision-making when purchasing. While visual art in product packaging should be designed to induce consumer’s favorable evaluations, it should not evoke excessive affective arousal, because this may lead to the depletion of consumer’s cognitive resources. Thus, consumers may use heuristic decision-making and commit an inadvertent mistake while purchasing. Most existing studies on visual arts in marketing have focused on preference (i.e., affective valence) using subjective evaluations. To address this, we applied a neuroscientific measure, electroencephalogram (EEG) to increase experimental validity. Two successive tasks were designed to examine the effects of affective arousal and affective valence, evoked by visual artwork, on the consecutive cognitive decision-making. In task 1, to evaluate the effect of visual art, EEG of two independent groups of people was measured when they viewed abstract artwork. The abstract art of neoplasticism (AbNP) group (n = 20) was showing Mondrian’s artwork, while the abstract art of expressionism (AbEX) group (n = 18) viewed Kandinsky’s artwork. The neoplasticism movement strove to eliminate emotion in art and expressionism to express the feelings of the artist. Building on Gallese’s embodied simulation theory, AbNP and AbEX artworks were expected to induce lower and higher affect, respectively. In task 2, we investigated how the induced affect differentially influenced a succeeding cognitive Stroop task. We anticipated that the AbEX group would deplete more cognitive resources than AbNP group, based on capacity limitation theory. Significantly stronger affect was induced in the AbEX group in task 1 than in the AbNP group, especially in affective arousal. In task 2, the AbEX group showed a faster reaction time and higher error rate in the Stroop task. According to our hypotheses, the higher affective arousal state of the AbEX group might deplete more cognitive resources during task 1 and result in poorer performance in task 2 because affect impacted their cognitive resources. This is the first study using neuroscientific measures to prove that high affective arousal induced by visual arts on packaging may induce heuristic decision-making in consumers, thereby advancing our understanding of neuromarketing.

Consumer Behaviour to Be Considered in Advertising: A Systematic Analysis and Future Agenda

“…The findings revealed that the product image that was generated with preference EEG-signals had more preference than the product image generated without preference EEG-signals. Kim, et al [ 95 ] conducted an experiment to identify the effect of visual art (e.g., Mondrian’s and Kandinsky’s artworks) on consumers’ preferences, by using EEG. The findings showed that the visual effects induced high emotional arousal, which might promote heuristic decision-making.…”

Consumer Neuroscience: Attentional Preferences for Wine Labeling Reflected in the Posterior Contralateral Negativity

“…The analysis of reaction times, recorded when participants classified the wine label, also confirms these findings. Research shows that the more we like something, the faster we tend to respond ( Ramsøy, 2014 ; Calvert et al, 2019 ; Kim et al, 2020 ). Our results reveal that participants had shorter RT for the most preferred label CE.…”

“…On average, participants took the same amount of time to select IE and IC. Consumer neuroscience research shows that the closer in values two options are, the harder would be for a person to decide between them ( Ramsøy, 2014 ; Kim et al, 2020 ). This might suggest that participants did not have a strong preference for one of the two labels, like for the CE label.…”

Mayoría de edad del Neuromarketing: mapa científico de 18 años de investigación en el área

“…Perception: estas investigaciones profundizan en las medidas de atención en distintos contextos. Entre sus hallazgos se encuentra que la atención visual a los banners en medios sociales presenta niveles bajos de conciencia y escaso o nulo recuerdo posterior (Muñoz-Leiva et al, 2019); el timbre y la sonoridad musical tienen efectos distintos en la construcción de la emoción (valencia y excitación) (Lin et al, 2014) y de la preferencia (Hsu y Chen, 2020); la evaluación de los atributos de los productos es un proceso cognitivo que modula la atención a partir de un procesamiento categórico basado en el juicio de similitud (Wang y Han, 2014) o en la familiaridad cultural (Ma et al, 2019); la atención conjunta incrementa la disposición a pagar más (Madipakkam et al, 2019); los criterios de evaluación en el consumo difieren entre consumidores prosociales (valoran más los costes y los beneficios colectivos) y no prosociales (valoran más el precio) (Medina et al, 2020); o que la elevada excitación afectiva inducida por las artes visuales en los envases de los productos puede conllevar una toma de decisiones heurística en los consumidores (Kim et al, 2020). 7.…”