••• automotive research
Auto shows rival digital marketing in car-buyer influence
A study by Michigan-based Foresight Research reveals that auto shows are actually as effective as digital marketing in influencing buyers’ purchase decisions among buyers engaged with each activity.
Based on surveys with 5,500 recent U.S. new car and truck buyers, Foresight’s 2017 Auto Show Immersion Report found three times as many buyers had read digital auto content prior to their purchase as attended an auto show in the same period. But comparing those two groups, auto show attendees were just as often influenced by their show experience as digital users were by the digital content they consumed.
The study confirms that auto shows provide a highly desirable audience for marketers. Buyers attending auto shows: are younger and 25 percent more often first-time new vehicle buyers; are more often luxury brand buyers; are far more car-connected – using multiple automotive communications and participating heavily in experiential marketing; are an invaluable source of downstream word of mouth – advising twice as many other people about new cars and trucks they should consider, recommending their purchased brand twice as often and posting or blogging 75 percent more often online about their new vehicle.
••• retailing research
Retailers, behold the power of touch
As online retailers continue to draw sales from brick-and-mortar stores, how can the physical locations compete? It could be as simple as reminding consumers that they can touch the merchandise, says Michigan Ross Professor Rajeev Batra.
And reaching out to consumers with the right mind-set is equally important, according to Batra and colleagues in a new study examining the effect of product touch on consumers’ willingness to buy.
“In this context, it is important to identify what strategies offline retailers can utilize to fight back,” says Batra, professor of marketing. “As online and offline retailers differ in their inherent ability to offer consumers the opportunity to physically touch a product prior to purchase, we studied the thought processes of consumers who rely more on pre-purchase touch to make purchase decisions – thus becoming more susceptible to marketing efforts from offline retailers.”
Study participants were evaluated considering the purchase of a mug, a computer mouse and a pen in three separate experiments. Researchers found that when consumers’ mental representation of products is relatively concrete, they rely on the availability of product touch to determine if they want to buy the product being evaluated.
Concrete thinkers increase their desire to purchase after touching the target product. For those who think of products in the abstract, their desire to buy a product is unaffected by touch entirely. “These results show for the first time that consumers’ cognitive styles affect their decision-making in the online and offline retailing environments,” Batra says.
Batra’s co-authors were Wumei Liu of Lanzhou University in China and Haizhong Wang of Sun Yat-Sen University in China. The study – “Product touch and consumers’ online and offline buying: The role of mental representation” – appeared in the Journal of Retailing.