Measuring Online Sensory Consumer Experience: Introducing the Online Sensory Marketing Index (OSMI) as a Structural Modeling Approach

Abstract

We present a novel quantitative approach to assessing sensory components on e-commerce websites. The Online Sensory Marketing Index (OSMI) provides a valuable measure of the sensory output exhibited by text, images, and other media. The OSMI enables website creators and marketers to communicate about sensory marketing elements and related components. Accordingly, websites could be designed to achieve better sensory appeal and mitigate weaknesses. Our index allows for the creation of sensory templates for various industries. Utilizing a field study of 16 websites in the tech, automotive, fashion, and food industries, we present sensory measures for websites’ acoustical and visionary elements that are easy to comprehend. Additionally, we introduce a score to quantify haptic, olfactory, and gustatory components to assess the online sensory consumer experience. We conclude and propose weighting offline and online sensory parameters per industry. Accordingly, we study quantitative parameters for online sensory overload and deprivation. Our assessment offers a comfortable determination of websites’ OSMI.