A Touching Experience: Designing for Touch Sensations in Online Retail Environments

IntroductionConsumers' experiences with retail offerings are intrinsically multisensory in nature (Rahman, 2012; Wastiels, Schifferstein, Wouters, & Heylighen, 2013). A product design can instantly stimulate multiple sensory modalities. Take, for example, the soft but cool touch of a silk scarf or the distinctive odor, light aluminum barrel, and intense color of a permanent marker. Previous research has established that both vision and touch are likely to dominate the perception and experience of product designs (Rahman, 2012; Schifferstein & Cleiren, 2005). Whereas vision is often almost instantly available even when the object is far away, touch is considered as a "proximal" sense since it is the only sense that requires contact with the skin (Krishna, 2009). Touch plays an important role in interpersonal intimacy and has therefore a large emotional component (Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, & Keltner, 2009; Schifferstein & Spence, 2008). Studies have indicated that touch can have strong influence on the liking of both animated and unanimated objects (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003; Essick et al., 2010; Morrison, Loken, & Olausson, 2010; Singh et al., 2014). More specifically, by exploring a product's intrinsic sensory attributes such as a surface's topographical and material properties using touch, it has been proposed that it is possible to make consumers feel attached to a product on an emotional level (Atakan, 2014; Essick et al., 2010; Peck & Wiggins, 2006; Shu & Peck, 2011). In fact, in consumer settings, affective attachment experienced during tactile exploration has been recognized as a strong driver of product liking (Millar, M. & Millar, K., 1996; Peck & Shu, 2009; Schifferstein, 2006; Sonneveld & Schifferstein, 2008). These results encourage retailers to provide interaction in stores with products that are pleasant to touch, such as having samples available for consumers to feel. However, in an online retail environment, where touch is unavailable prior to purchase, consumers typically evaluate products on visual attributes and/or according to other (rather rational; cf. Ng, Chaya, & Hort, 2013) product-extrinsic features, including price, brand, and reliability of the store, instead of the product-intrinsic sensory attributes. Therefore, the lack of tactile exploration may leave consumers less emotionally engaged in online product experiences, which might be linked to the failure of certain products to be successfully sold online.While it is clear that the act of tactile caressing cannot (yet) realistically be reproduced in the online store environment, consumers seem at least to expect to feel that products can be touched or that they can visualize how it would be like to hold the product in their hands (Kim & Forsythe, 2009; Okonkwo, 2010). T. Verhagen, Vonkeman, Feldberg, and P. Verhagen (2014) revealed that the perceived tangibility of the online product increased when consumers can experience the product by directly interacting with it, not when consumers passively receive static stimuli. In addition, studies in the field of neuroscience have noted that observing the act of an object (animated or unanimated) being touched can already activate brain regions involved in tactile perception, even when the observer's body is not directly stimulated (Serino, Pizzoferrato, & Ladavas, 2008). Such activation can even result in a behavioral effect, i.e., feeling actual tactile sensations (Blakemore, Bristow, Bird, Frith, & Ward, 2005; Keysers et al., 2004; Serino et al., 2008). In this study we propose that the integration of visual interactive cues simulating stroking gestures may psychologically evoke the sense of touch in the online store environment. Notwithstanding that research has already indicated that technological advancements (e.g., 360-spin rotation, video, virtual model, augmented reality) bring the online product experience closer to reality (Kim & Forsythe, 2008; Verhagen et al. …