Soo Hyun Jun, Bournemouth University, and Stephen Holland, University of Florida, published “Information-Processing Strategies: A Focus on Pictorial Information Roles” in the March online first issue of Journal of Travel Research. Professor Jun shared some background information about the article.
Who is the target audience for this article?
Scholars and practitioners interested in consumer decision-making, mobile marketing, and experimental research methods in tourism and hospitality contexts.
What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
This study started with a question of why elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (ELM; Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983) has hardly been tested with hedonic and/or experiential products. Petty and Cacioppo (1980) once tested ELM with a beauty product and the study results did not support their assumptions because the peripheral-cue manipulation was perceived as product merits by high-involved participants. We conjectured if researchers pretested ELM with various types of products in pilot experiments and constantly found statistically-not-significant-results with hedonic/experiential products, these products would be overlooked for primary studies. This study attempted to show that the insignificant results with hedonic/experiential products were due to the multiple roles of pictorial information, rather than misled research designs.
Were there findings that were surprising to you?
Three rules were revealed for high-involved individuals’ interactive processing because of offsetting, redundancy and negative-valence effects. Additionally, this study found that low-involved individuals were more likely to focus on an attractive picture and high-involved individuals were more likely to focus on an unattractive picture.
How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
This study investigated the information-processing strategies that travellers utilized in information judgment and decision-making through an experimental research method. The method and results utilized in this study should inspire academic and applied researchers to adopt new ways of conceptualizing information-processing behaviors and to utilize experimental research methods to expand our understanding of travellers’ decision making.
How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
I have studied information-processing strategies that travellers utilize for their decision-making.
How did your paper change during the review process?
I sincerely appreciate the insightful and helpful comments from the editor and reviewers. The paper became more succinct and focused.
What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and go this study again?
An unintended instrumentation effect was suspected in this study related to the length of text argument statements. Future studies should use longer sentences which require more effort in processing.
