Emotional Factors That Influence Consumers’ Attention In The Perspective Of Inhibition Of Return

While online consumption has become a crucial form of consumption,the convenience store industry has taken up an economic scale in the retail market that cannot be ignored in recent years and is also on a continuous growth trend.Convenience stores have emerged from the trend of the times and have become an important vehicle for serving people’s livelihoods.With the new retail format and business environment,how can merchandise attract consumers’ attention in order to get a head start in the fierce competition.As a key stage in the overall consumption process,consumption decisions can be directly predicted by the attention of the consumer,therefore attracting the attention of consumers during their visual search on the shelf is key to increasing sales.Numerous studies have shown that emotions and consumption are inseparable and that emotions play an increasingly prominent role in consumption decisions.When an individual’s emotions are combined with emotional factors in the consumption scenario,attention will be biased towards positive emotional information due to the goal of maintaining a good emotional state,which will directly influence consumption decisions.In addition to this,product packaging and its position on the shelf are also important factors in attracting consumers’ attention and play a very important part in merchandising.Color and spatial location have been shown to be emotional,so how does emotional information such as the color of the packaging and the position on the shelf affect consumers’ attention when combined with consumer emotions? Visual attention preferentially captures emotional information to create an attentional bias,and inhibition of return(IOR),an important adaptive mechanism in visual search,can inhibit attention from returning to the location or object attribute that was noticed.Based on this,what suggestions can be made for marketing strategies relating to packaging and display from the perspective of inhibition of return?Based on the emotional dimensional classification,three experiments were conducted to investigate the attentional bias of individuals towards different emotional information in different emotional states.After eliciting positive or negative emotions from the subjects,the experiments were conducted using the "cue-target" paradigm commonly used in inhibition of return-related studies.Experiments 1A and 1B explored the effect of emotion on color and location-based inhibition of return,respectively,and Experiment 2 combined color with spatial location properties to investigate how emotion would affect location-based inhibition of return.The results showed that both positive and negative emotions resulted in the shortest response time to warm color and stimuli located above,i.e.,the least amount of inhibition of return and therefore attentional bias.When color was combined with the spatial location attribute,subjects responded fastest to stimuli located above with warm color and slowest to those located below in cool tone,which again validated the results of Experiments 1A and 1B,and considered both product packaging and shelf location attributes to make corresponding recommendations for merchandising.These conclusions could be drawn from this study:1.In positive or negative states,subjects are biased to pay attention to positive stimuli(warm colors,located above spatial locations)due to the need to maintain or change emotional states,and their inhibition of return effect is weakened.Therefore,merchandisers should use warm colors as the main color of their packaging,and retailers should display high margin items at the top of the shelf as a way to attract more attention and increase purchases.2.When both color and spatial location attributes are present,subjects have the greatest attentional bias towards stimuli with warm colors that are located above,have the lowest inhibition of return.Therefore,retailers may consider the color of the product packaging where the profitability of the product is comparable,and display high margin products with warm packaging at the top to maximum consumer attention and sales profitability.