Minjeong Kim, associate dean of the College of Business, explained April 30 why she enjoys studying how people go about shopping for apparel.
“If you go to the grocery store for Coke or Pepsi, you know what you’re going to buy,” she told members of Triad, OSU’s faculty and staff club, at its weekly meeting at the Memorial Union building. “But if you go to a clothing store, you know you need a new jacket, or a new outfit for some event, but you don’t know what you’re going to buy. Every time you go in, it’s a whole new experience.”
The title of Kim’s lunch-hour presentation was “Online Apparel Shopping: A Peek into the Consumer’s Mind.”
“It’s about an emotional connection with the product,” she said. “So how can people buy apparel online when they can’t see it or feel it or try it on? My research came out of skepticism — how could they do that?”
Kim has studied a variety of e-commerce website design techniques and their effect, if any, on facilitating someone to make a purchase decision.
For example, she theorized that seeing a larger picture of an item would generate a stronger purchase intention than a smaller photo, but that did not prove to be the case. Seeing more product information in the form of text, however, did create a stronger purchase intention.
Kim explained to Triad the concept of concreteness, defined as the degree of ease or difficulty involved in eliciting a mental image. Concrete words such as “apple” tend to invoke a sensory experience, whereas non-concrete words such as “religion” do not.
She also spoke about mental imagery – the process by which sensory or perceptual experience is represented in an individual’s working memory – and speculated that mental imagery could be a key to facilitating a satisfactory virtual shopping experience without having physical experience with a product.
Putting those concepts together, she talked about how whether a product such as a swimsuit sells better online if the photo of the model has a blank background or a concrete one, such as a beach scene. Results depended, she said, on whether the shopper was a visual learner (generally more likely to buy with a concrete background) or verbal learner (more likely with a blank background).
And responding to a post-presentation question from the audience, she provided information that likely most suspected was true: For men, clothes shopping tends toward hasty and utilitarian, whereas for women it’s often a pleasure-seeking experience.