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

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Raghunathan, Rajagopal
Ward, Adrian F.

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Marketers often use images to promote their products. For example, an advertisement for kitchen tools might display the tools alongside various ingredients, or 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. Motivated by a fundamental principle from physics-namely, that entropy can only increase over time-the present research examines how entropy influences consumers' judgments and decisions. Across two pilot studies and five experiments, we find that while high-entropy images shift consumers' temporal focus to the past, low-entropy images shift their temporal focus to the future. These entropy-induced shifts in temporal focus influence consumers' decisions. Specifically, consistent with the notion of "fit fluency," we find that consumers evaluate past-related (e.g., vintage) products more favorably when they are accompanied by high-entropy images and future-related (e.g., futuristic) products more favorably when they are accompanied by low-entropy images. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

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Oxford Univ Press Inc

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Business

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Journal of Consumer Research

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10.1093/jcr/ucab042

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