The Impacts Of Information Density Of Advertisements On Consumers' Purchasing Behavior

In the age of Internet economy,consumers receive much more information everyday compared to the past years.In this new situation,merchants need to control the amount of information in their advertisements in an appropriate level in order to achieve the best advertising effect.The existing studies found that there is an "optimal level" of the information density in advertisements.When the density of advertising information exceeds this level,the high information density will reduce the consumer's evaluation of the product.However,there are still some questions about what factors can affect this "optimal level".In this paper,we consistently found that consumers' attitude toward,evaluation,and online purchase registration of products are influenced both by the information density of the advertisements and by the consumers' chance or easiness of mental imagery.Specifically,we found that participants offered with(vs.without)chances or with easiness to perform mental imagery had higher attitude toward,evaluation,and online purchase registration of products with high(vs.low)ad information density.By contrast,participants without(vs.with)chances to perform mental imagery had higher attitude toward,evaluation,and online purchase registration of products with low(vs.high)ad information density.Moreover,the expectations of participants that the product delivers what it promises mediated the interaction effect.In this paper,three experiments are designed to verify the hypothesis above.Experiment 1 verifies the interaction effect between advertising information density and consumers' chance or easiness of mental imagery.Experiment 2 verifies the above-mentioned interaction effect,and further reveals its internal mechanism,that is,expectations of participants that the product delivers what it promises can play a mediating role.Experiment 3 is a field experiment,which verifies that the main hypothesis of this paper is still valid under the real marketing situation,which improves the reliability of the conclusion.The results of this paper can help enterprises to determine the most appropriate advertising information density according to the advertising scene and the target customers,so as to enhance the marketing effect.