THE EFFECTS OF ONLINE APPAREL PHOTO CODE COMPOSITIONS TO ENHANCE WOMEN’S PURCHASE INTENTION

The shift in the socioeconomic structure towards the M-shape has given rise to a new consumer concept: affordable fashion. Thanks to the ultrahigh prevalence of the Internet access and handheld mobile devices, it has become a norm in modern consumer buying to browse and shop for apparel products or information quickly and easily online. Therefore, how to ensure that target consumer groups receive through visual communications precisely the messages that brands want to convey has become a key issue in today’s e-commerce operation. This study summarized how components of product photos are combined and how these photos are laid out on the websites of seven affordable fashion brands from Taiwan and other countries and developed hypotheses based on the data from the case study analysis of these brands. The formal experiment was conducted using simulated webpages in combination with questionnaires to analyze product photos that combine the three visual codes: product, person and setting, and examine which of these can better stimulate mental simulations by participants in the four facets: ‘participant’s favorability towards characteristics of personal appearance’, ‘others’ favorability towards characteristics of participant’s appearance’, participant’s imaged actual ‘occasion for wearing’ and ‘enhanced purchase intention’. ‘Participant’s frequency of online shopping use’ was added as one of the variables in this study. It is found that heavy female users of online shopping are more influenced by product photos that combine ‘a face showing model and an imagery-based setting’ in the two facets of mental simulation: ‘occasion for wearing’ and ‘enhanced purchase intention’ while light users are more influenced by products photos that combine ‘a face hiding model and an imagery-based setting’.