Will you buy if others touch it? Evaluation of products touched by others during shopping

Abstract

Research on multisensory nature of consumption has highlighted importance of smell, taste, and touch during product evaluation and subsequent purchase decisions. While sensory cues have a role to play in evaluation of products and services, their actual effects gets swayed by presence of other situational contexts which can substantially enhance the ability to explain and understand consumer-behavioural acts. One of the important situational context – social surroundings - has not been examined in detail for studies related to touch. Two previous studies have defined social surrounding in terms of presence/absence of unknown shopper. However, in many situations, the shopping activity is accompanied by family members or friends. Also, presence of salesperson acts as an important constituent of social surroundings. Any analysis of social surrounding is incomplete if it does not look into role of salespersons and known co-shoppers as part of social surroundings which influence shopping process. In this paper, it is proposed that social surrounding, as defined by presence of salespersons and known co-shoppers, has a role to play in haptic evaluation of products.