Impact of video-messages on consumers' implicit response

Abstract

Understanding consumers' responses to health and sustainability messages is crucial for influencing food choices and promoting long-term behavioural change. This study combined implicit methods (pupil dilation, heart rate, and skin conductance) with explicit methods (retained information) to gain insight into the response of consumers to messages displayed in different video formats (formal and TikTok) considering different type of information (sustainability and healthiness). Eighty-five participants attended two sessions, held two weeks apart. In each session, they watched one of two videos: one in a formal format and the other in a TikTok format. The videos introduced a new protein-enriched bread highlighting its health and sustainability benefits. After the video, participants indicated the messages they remembered. While viewing the videos, the pupil diameter, heart rate, and skin conductance of participants were recorded. Results showed that pupil dilation, skin conductance and heart rate of participants varied when watching the different messages on different format videos. Pupil dilation response depended on the format of the video. It was greater for the TikTok video than formal due to the differences in visual characteristics among the two formats. Heart rate and skin conductance varied mainly depending on the content of the messages. In general, those messages that coincided with a decrease in heart rate and an increase in skin conductance were most likely to be retained by participants. According to the results, changes in these physiological parameters indicate different attention and arousal states in response to different video messages. They can be useful to implicitly determine the elements and information with impact in consumers providing complementary information to understand consumers decisions towards healthy and sustainable messages.

Keywords: Consumers; Heart rate; Implicit response; Information attention; Pupil dilation; Skin conductance; Social media; Sustainability; Video.