Differences in attitude and purchase intention for multisensory stimuli in online stores with decreasing product congruence in terms of super additivity and cross-modal correspondence

This study aims to verify how the current findings related to multisensory marketing can be transferred to online stores, where the sensory stimuli are perceived through imagination, except for the visual sense. The authors conducted two web experiments. The subjects evaluated soft drinks, chocolates, and t-shirts, with a wide variety of sensory combinations using three semantic scales to examine attitude, purchase intention, and the sensory stimuli used. The results show that for a given product congruence, the effect of super additivity could not be observed, but that the effect of cross-modal correspondence could. With decreasing product congruence, observations became unambiguous as expected so that only the effect of product congruence can be applied in online stores even with a partial congruence. The paper shows that the previous findings are not necessarily transferable to a digital context.