Resort hotel pictures are shown on the advertisements used for this study.
A study has found that multiple visual perspective descriptions of products and services may have a detrimental effect on consumer evaluations.
Dr Jiang Yuwei
The usual presumption is that providing descriptions of a product from multiple visual perspectives is informative, having a positive effect on consumer evaluations. However, that is not always the case according to a PolyU study.
Consumers often imagine themselves in a scene and engage in such self-imagery while processing product and service information. They may engage in self-imagery to construct an experience or to acquire information by imagining themselves interacting with a product or service. This can influence how the mental images are generated, thus affecting judgements. With these assumptions in mind, Dr Jiang Yuwei at the Department of Management and Marketing conducted a joint study with professors from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Tel Aviv University and University of Illinois to take a functional view of the process of imagery.
Through four experiments on goal-driven imagery and visual perspectives, imagination difficulty was determined by eye-tracking evidence. The study used the visual perspectives from which mental images are formed to highlight how the goals of self-imagery might lead to different outcomes.
The results showed that when individuals are disposed to construct an image-based narrative representation of the use of a product or service, differences in the visual perspectives of the images make it difficult to construct the mental images, and consequently have a negative impact on evaluations of the product or service. In contrast, when individuals are simply motivated to acquire information about a product or service, pictures from different perspectives serve as references, thus enhance their evaluations of it.
According to the researchers, when the orientation of a scene changes through either a change in the viewer's position or a rotation of the objects, memory for the scene weakens. The study thus suggests that multiple perspectives of the same scene might have a detrimental effect on memory, affecting the evaluation negatively. ♦
