Today in Digital Marketing - Deep Dive: Exploiting the "Vicarious Hand Effect" in Marketing

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

How does a photo holding a product move the needle in terms of that product's consumer perception? More than you'd think. Tod speaks to a researcher who studied this effect.There are many advantages of e-commerce for the consumer — they can shop from home, it’s easier to compare products from different stores. But there’s always been one big disadvantage: They can’t touch anything. Sometimes, holding a product in your hand, is as much a part of the buying process as holding your credit card there.But if we can’t give them a good feeling by letting them touch the product, can we get at least half-way there?That’s what Andrea Luangrath set out to discover. She is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. She her colleagues have published a fascinating research study in the Journal of Marketing Research called “The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality.”.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca. Hello, friends. It's Todd, and I am currently out of the country on vacation. I'll be back Thursday, February 29th. So instead of a regular newscast type show, please enjoy this deep dive interview. There are many advantages of e-commerce for the consumer. They can shop from home. It's easier to compare products from different stores. But there's always been one big disadvantage. They can't touch anything.

Sometimes holding a product in your hand is as much a part of the buying process as holding your credit card in your hand. But if we can't give them a good feeling by letting them touch the product, can we at least get halfway there? That's what Andrea Luangrath set out to discover. She is an associate professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. She and her colleagues have published a fascinating research study in the Journal of Marketing Research called The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality. Dr. Luongrath joins me now from her office in Iowa City, Iowa. Hello. Thank you for having me, Todd. Before we get to your main findings, what is a

vicarious haptic effect? Great question. So broadly in this work, we were interested in how observing touch influences consumers in a virtual world. So one thing that we know is that touch is a very powerful tool for marketers. If you can get a consumer to touch a product in a store, they're significantly more likely to buy it. So in this work, we were really wondering, well, can we reap some similar benefits of touch by simply observing touch in digital environments? And what were your findings? So what we found was that, yes, you absolutely can. What we see is that people evaluate products more favorably when they see a hand reaching out and touching it. They report greater willingness to pay of that product. And you might be wondering, well, why is that, right? Why does that happen? What we see is that

this is because it fosters a sense of what we call psychological ownership. So it makes people feel as if the product being touched is their own. The product feels like it's mine. And this is really what drives product valuation. So if you really want to think about this phenomenon, you can imagine Starbucks, right? Starbucks creates a lot of social media content. And they create a lot of images of their coffee cups, right, of their products. And these images often display their products being held out in a hand, right? You can imagine a hand holding a coffee cup, maybe against a beautiful backdrop of flowers or leaves. And this is really the phenomenon that we're looking at. So what is the effect of that vicarious touch? Well, and what marketing benefit? I mean, what needle, I guess,

is what I'm asking? What needle is sort of moved by seeing a hand? Are consumers more willing to buy a product? Do they get a warm feeling about the brand? Do they consider the product to be more valuable? Like, what is the marketing benefit that gets changed by that? We evaluate a lot of different outcomes of this touch. One is that they just evaluate the product more favorably. They like the product more. Two is that they actually report being willing to pay more for the product. So they report being willing to pay about 32% more for products after having seen them touched as compared to not touched.

We also test this with social media content. So we look at whether or not consumers will actually engage more frequently with products that are shown being touched as compared to not touched. And so we looked at Instagram posts of brands, and we see that Indeed's consumer engagement goes up for those brands, for those posts that actually have and show touch. Those are all really solid. I mean, those are the kinds of marketing benefits that marketers, you know, really lose sleep over sometimes, you know, and it's always been

interesting to me that small details, like in your case, in the case of your study, having a hand there, having a hand touching it can make such a big difference. Is it enough to just show a hand in the product photo or does the hand need to be touching the product? This is a really critical piece of it. The hand actually needs to be in physical contact with the product. So we test this in a lot of different ways. We have a hand physically contacting a product, and we test that against a hand that's just merely present in the image or in the video clip. And we test that against having no hand at all, no hand present in the content. And by and large, the content that is the most effective is when that hand is engaging with the product physically in a very meaningful way.

Did you test different formats, like how a photo would perform versus an animated GIF versus a video versus maybe its presence in virtual reality? Yes, we tested all of those. So we tested static images from Instagram. We tested it across a number of different experiments. We actually created our own custom virtual reality retail store, and we created different formats of this VR store for people to enter. So in our custom virtual reality store, we had a virtual hand reaching out and touching a product.

And so we actually put people into these environments and then evaluated a lot of different things. We asked them about their evaluations of the products. At the same time, we actually collected physiological responses to see how people were responding to viewing that touch. And we see that the people who are really stimulated by that, by that virtual reality environment, have even stronger effects of touch. What do you mean by physiology? Do you mean like heart rate and so on? Exactly. Yes, we capture people's heart rate. And so we look at that as essentially an indicator of individual differences in people. There are just some people who are particularly stimulated by these environments. And for those

people, the effects of touch were even stronger. How would you know that increased heart rate means good? Well, that's a good question. There is prior research to suggest that an increase in heart rate is an indicator of the extent to which you are really immersed in the experience. So it's really an indication of the extent to which this virtual environment is stimulating for you. And so we're kind of leveraging prior work to use that as an indicator. All right. So you studied the difference between static, GIF, video, VR. I don't think many folks who listen to this podcast are yet in VR marketing per se, but of the previous three, which you tested, static, animated GIF, video, I don't know, I haven't read this part of your study, but I'm guessing that video is going to be the strongest animated GIF lower and static image the least effective of this. Am I right?

We actually don't make that comparison exactly in the research. So I'm not making a modality comparison, if that's the way you want to think about it, right? I'm not comparing static images versus video clips. What we're comparing within each of those modalities. So is touch better than seeing no touch within static images or within video clips? And that's really what we see. But certainly as you move along, those levels of engagement increase as well. Right. So people tend to be more engaged with video content than with static images. Yeah. And, you know, I'm always hesitant to ask a scientist to what their gut feel is because scientists don't like gut feels as much as what the data says.

But if you had to, you know, if you were in Vegas and had to put 500 bucks down on it, where would you put your money? I guess more on the on the video side. Is that your gut feel? Maybe. But actually, I don't I don't even know that I would make that prediction. And the reason is that the effect of touch, what's really actually pretty incredible about this is that this has been a really strong effect regardless of modality, right? So we see this effect of touch and the benefits that you get from touch occurring simply with these images, right? So I definitely hesitate to say that one modality is better than the other, but the effect of touch is very strong. We do know that.

Is there any instance in which you definitely would not want to show a hand, you know, where the inclusion of a hand would be bad? This is also an interesting part of the work that we've done in this space, because this is exactly what many researchers set out to do. We try to find situations where we can break an effect, right, where we can turn off an effect when it doesn't occur. And what was fascinating about this research is that this was incredibly hard to do. You wouldn't expect it, but it was really hard to do. We went to great lengths to try to find instances in which this doesn't happen. We even gave people reminders of contagious disease cues. We presented CDC signs to people reminding people that there are germs on hands. And this is at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning, and we're testing this with people. And then we

show them an image or a video of a hand touching a product, and still it has these benefits for increasing product evaluations, for increasing willingness to pay. And this was very surprising to us. We didn't expect this effective touch to be so resilient to all of our attempts to turn it off. That is incredible. It's very, you know, very few instances, I think, where you get to a place in the marketing world, at least on the execution side, where it sounds like this is kind of a no-brainer. It sort of sounds like have a hand touching the product if you can and everything gets better regardless of how it's done. Is that too? Am I being too obtuse there? I don't think so. I think that is the implication.

It's amazing how well it works. It has surprised us. How did gender affect this? I'm curious to know if the results are different when it's clearly a female hand, but it is a male viewer. Again, great question. And we've tested this. I'm curious to know if the results are different when it's clearly a female hand, but it is a male viewer. Again, great question. And we've tested this. It doesn't matter. It doesn't seem to matter if the gender of the hand is congruent or incongruent, the same or different from your own gender. Touch is still better than no touch. We tested this with various depictions of hands. We went so far as to testing this with a digitally created blue hand. So we literally created a disembodied blue hand that was reaching out and touching the product. It represents and looks nothing like a human hand. And yet that digital hand reaching out and touching it was still more beneficial than just seeing that hand not engaging with the product.

Which actually makes me wonder, speaking about color, what about race? Was there a difference for like black people viewing Caucasian hands? We also tested this. And what we still see is that regardless of race, touch is better than no touch. We do see that people based on your race are able to identify more closely with hands that kind of represent their own skin tone. But this was independent of touch. It had nothing to do with the touch effect that we were investigating. But we do see that effect, right, where it's easier to feel as if the hand is yours, if it's closer to matching your own skin tone. What surprised you the most about your findings? The stickiness of them. The extent to which they persisted, even in the face of attempts to turn them off. It also surprised me that we actually see this content so frequently, and most of us probably don't even realize it.

So in all of the Instagram, the thousands of Instagram posts that we collected from brands, about 43% of all of these Instagram images showed hands touching a product. Now, we sampled specifically on brands that had handheld products, right? So we weren't looking at financial institutions or, you know, different types of companies like that, but we were looking at brands that have handheld products, and a very large percentage of those posts actually show touch. What made you want to study this? And a very large percentage of those posts actually show touch. What made you want to study this? Oh, well, a lot of my research centers around how our lived realities and whether our lived realities translate into digital and virtual domains. So I'm endlessly fascinated by whether kind of the psychological models that we've built up for in-person interactions, in-person retail experiences

translate into digital worlds. This is reflected in some of my work where I look at how nonverbal communication cues get translated into text, so into how people communicate through social media. You can imagine, right, in person, we have all sorts of cues that we get from conversation, like body language and facial expressions. And we translate those into text in different ways. So I study also nonverbal cues in text as well. So I'm very fascinated just about the translation and how our experiences are mediated by technology and what that means for consumer perceptions. I'm going to end by asking you a completely

unfair question. I want you to tell me what the perfect composition of a photo with the hand is. Is it the left hand holding it? Is it the right hand? How much room does the hand take up in the photo? Dr. Luangrath, tell me the secret formula. I wish I had it. I wish I had the secret formula. Every product category is going to be a little bit different, probably, in terms of the perfect

composition. But what I can tell you is that the hand needs to be engaging in physical contact with the product and it must be doing something natural with the product and meaningful. So if you create the touch to be something meaningless, like knocking on a cup, right? That's not a typical form of touch. It needs to be typical, it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be in direct contact with the product. The rest of it, in terms of color or composition or spacing, I'll leave that to other experts to weigh in on that part. Fair enough. Well, it is fascinating research. I'm delighted you were able to share it with us.

You had other colleagues assisting you on this paper as well? In this work, I collaborated with a number of excellent collaborators. Joanne Peck from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bill Hedgecock from the University of Minnesota, and Yishang Zhu at UC Berkeley. Super. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much for having me.

Andrea Luangrath is an associate professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. You can find her study online. Search for The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality.