Product personality rating style for satisfaction of tactile need of online buyers — A human factors issue in the context of e-retailers' web-design

Abstract

Other than visual information, perceptions through tactile senses play a very important role in perceiving product quality and thus in choice making for product purchase by consumers. Presently, it is felt by marketing research people that there is always a need of satisfying tactile perception of the targeted buyers for increasing sale. Since it is still not feasible to have direct perception of tactile information of product in e-retailing environment, there is need of alternative means of information which can satisfy tactile need of e-buyer. E-retailers' main target is to impress their consumer pool by providing those information which are searched by consumers during on shelves buying. To achieve this goal, aim of the present paper is to investigate the effectiveness of product personality rating style as an alternative mean of satisfying tactile need of consumers during product review process; instead of written product reviews commonly found on e-retailers' websites. Observations of the current research clearly indicated that product personality ratings are capable of representing tactile experiences of products in complementary way and these features satisfied tactile need of consumers to some extent. Therefore, it is advised that e-retailers might use product personality ratings to satisfy consumers' tactile need during product review process and to merchandise their products on their web-sites.