A study of customer's emotional change by the ways of presenting pictures of clothing at online shops

온라인 쇼핑몰에서 상품 표현방식에 따른 감성변화에 관한 연구

Online shoppers are not able to try clothing on. Therefore, the pictures of clothing on the website play a significant role when shoppers make decision on their purchase. There are generally three different ways to show clothing at online shops. The first one is showing only clothing images, and the second one is showing the pictures that have actual fitting models wearing clothing on (In this case, Model's face is mostly not shown in the picture.), and the third is showing the pictures of professional fitting models who wear goods. The shopping malls adopt each of the different ways but little is known about affect on purchasing from these three ways. The aim of this study is to figure out how the online shopper's emotional status is affected by these three ways of presenting pictures of clothing. At first, we developed a set of adjective words of human emotion to set up the evaluation criteria for user's emotional status. Those adjectives are originally from the precedent research on human emotion. To cut 99 adjectives down to a proper number for the criteria, we conducted a preliminary survey, and finally, 5 adjectives are selected as appropriate criteria for evaluating users' emotional status while they are shopping. Those five adjectives are 'possess','sensual', 'unique', 'tasteful', and 'stylish'. Then, we conducted the main survey showing 10 kinds of cloth (each cloth was consist of 3 ways). And in the page of model images, we measured the model's preference for understanding the relation with customer's emotion criteria of the product. As a result of the test there was statistically significant difference between product only images and anonymous images, but there was no significant difference between anonymous images and model images. And the preference of the model and value of the emotion criteria have large correlation except 'unique' criteria. It is expected that the result in this study will help to build new marketing strategy which satisfy customers' emotion.