THE INTERACTION OF CROWD, MESSAGE CONTENT AND MESSAGE FRAME ON GENERATING PURCHASE INTENTIONS IN RETAILING

Abstract

This study targets to measure the interactional effect of crowding level in a shoppingenvironment, the content and framing type of the message on purchase intentionsof consumers in a retail context. An experimental design was employed with crowdlevel (no crowd vs crowd), message content (cognitive vs affective) and frame type(positive vs negative) as the manipulated conditions. Results of the study confirm thatframe type moderates the two-way interaction between the crowd level and messagecontent. In case of positive frames, level of perceived crowding has differing levels ofeffect on purchase intentions of consumers depending on the content type exposed.Environments with no crowd lead to higher purchase intentions when consumers areexposed to information intensive messages and crowded environments lead to higherpurchase intentions when consumers are exposed to emotion intensive messages.Finally, when consumers are exposed to negatively framed messages, independentfrom other factors, they generate higher purchase intentions.