Looking backwards to move forwards: assessing the informativeness of mobile shoppable video

Abstract

ABSTRACT For both marketing professionals and researchers, what is shiny and new continues to captivate. The latest ‘it’ thing that marketers are gravitating towards is shoppable video where brands and retailers emphasize, entertain and engage consumers with mobile content that is directly ‘shoppable.’ In this new temporal and spatial interactive context, this study dissects the informative content of shoppable videos to develop an initial and comprehensive understanding of mobile shoppable videos. A content analysis of 200 shoppable videos utilizing emotional soft-sell type appeals, utilitarian hard-sell type appeals and humor appeals indicates that utilitarian-focused hard-sell shoppable videos dominate this new landscape thus creating a mobile shopping experience that relies on a hard-sell approach. Under an evolutionary perspective, the content of mobile shoppable videos or ‘digital direct-response ads’ was then compared to the content of direct-response infomercials to account for the modernization bias of digital marketing and explore how the informativeness of shoppable videos evolves and adapts over time. Findings suggest that mobile-designed creative executions adapt the hard-sell standard and feature significantly fewer mentions of price, special offers and guarantees, new ideas, and company research as they contextually adapt. It shows in the future-obsessed digital arena, old and dreary formats can conceptually and practically inform ‘next generation’ ‘revolutionary’ formats, which provides a foundation for future research into mobile shoppable video and updates marketing best practices.