Abstract:

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

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