Exploring the Store with Your Hands

Abstract: Marketers have acknowledged the great importance of touch during consumers' decision-making process. However, no one has ever empirically investigated if this holds true even for products whose material properties are not diagnostic for the product performance, such as packaged FMCG. This is a big gap in the research of tactile marketing, a gap that needs to be filled. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore if tactile marketing can be utilized in the FMCG environment and how this will affect consumers. This is done by including a tactile element, in this thesis a swatch of velvet, in the package design of two products with different underlying purchase motivations. The potential pitfall when utilizing tactile marketing in the retailing environment - consumer contamination - is also examined to see whether there is a negative effect on consumers' evaluation and action intentions when they know that others have previously touched the products.A quantitative experiment was conducted in a real life setting, comparing the groups of respondents that were exposed to the manipulated packages with those exposed to the original packages, with or without a cue that other consumers had previously touched the products. A total of 385 responses were collected. The results revealed that by adding a tactile element in the product packaging, consumers developed a higher level of interest towards the brand and product category, developed a higher level of confidence, produced a higher level of conviction and finally, induced a higher intention to act. However, the results also indicated that when consumers received a contamination cue, there might be a negative effect on their evaluations and action intentions. Nevertheless, it has also been proven that the negative effects of consumer contamination do not exceed the positive effects of tactile marketing.