Consumers as naive physicists : how visual entropy cues shift temporal focus and influence product evaluations

Marketers often use images to promote their products. For example, an advertisement for kitchen tools might display the tools alongside various ingredients; likewise, an advertisement for a bookstore might showcase pictures of the store’s interior. One underlying visual characteristic of such images is the degree of “entropy”—or disorder—in their content. Using a fundamental principle from physics—namely, that entropy can only increase over time—as the starting point, my dissertation examines how entropy influences consumers’ judgments and decisions. Specifically, my first essay demonstrates that while high-entropy images shift consumers’ temporal focus to the past, low-entropy images shift their temporal focus to the future. Further, my second essay shows that entropy-induced shifts in temporal focus influence consumers’ decisions. Specifically, consistent with the notion of “temporal fit fluency,” I find that consumers evaluate past-related (e.g., vintage) products more favorably when they are accompanied by high-entropy images, and they evaluate future-related (e.g., futuristic) products more favorably when these products are accompanied by low-entropy images.Marketin

Ölüm belirginliğinin Türkiye’deki tüketicilerin neyi, ne kadar ve kimin için tüketecekleri kararlarına etkileri

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of mortality salience on Turkish consumers’ decisions on how to allocate their money between saving and spending, how much to spend for materials and experiences, for whom to make purchases, and which product designs to choose. Terror Management Theory constitutes the theoretical framework of the study. It is hypothesized that the participants who were made to think about death would spend more money than the participants who were made to think about dental pain would do. Besides, mortality salience (MS) participants are expected to spend meaningfully more money on materialistic consumption than dental pain (DP) participants. Also, it is thought that compared to DP participants, MS participants will spend significantly more money on others and show a higher preference for a product with a local abstract symbol design. However, the results of this study revealed that mortality salience affects consumer decisions mainly in terms of the cash amount that people would like to keep, the money amount that they would use for materialistic consumption, and the share of the spending on others in the total spending budget.M.S. - Master of Scienc