Additive omnichannel atmospheric cues: The mediating effects of cognitive and affective responses on purchase intention

Abstract

In today's channel-centric retail ecosystem the right mix and orchestration of online and offline stimulus is paramount towards providing an optimal store atmosphere and shopping experience. Applying the S-O-R framework, this research explores additive omnichannel atmospheric cues stimuli, in order to discover their impact on affective (i.e., pleasure, arousal and dominance) and cognitive (i.e., store environmental quality perception) states and their consequential effect on consumer responses in the form of purchase intention. Employing a four-condition repeated measures experimental design in a physical store, utilizing mobile, IoT and social media channels (Study 1), as well as a between-subjects online lab experiment (Study 2), this research sheds light into the affective and cognition-mediated causal mechanisms that influence shopping outcomes. This work reveals that combining stimulus from all retail channels within the physical store (i.e., omnichannel atmospheric cues) increases consumers' pleasure, arousal and the quality of the environment as a whole, which in turn positively influences purchase intention. However, the impact of dominance is only prominent at the more controlled, laboratory setting, in which purchase intention increases while dominance attenuates.