Impact of the quality and elaboration of mental imagery on consumer purchase intention: An empirical study based on the sensory marketing framework

The impact of mental imagery on consumer behavior has recently garnered significant interest, especially its impact on purchase intention, emotional response, and decision confidence. The integrative sensory marketing framework (Krishna 2013) is adopted to explore the differential effects of two key dimensions of mental imagery, quality and elaboration, on consumers’ emotion, cognition, and behavior. Imagery quality enhanced purchase intention primarily by influencing decision confidence, whereas imagery elaboration affected this through anticipatory emotions. This study further validated the mediating effects of anticipatory emotions and decision confidence between imagery dimensions and purchase intention. By distinguishing between imagery quality and elaboration, as well as incorporating the sensory marketing framework, this study has not only deepened our understanding on the mechanism by which mental imagery affects the consumer decision-making process, but also provided new theoretical perspectives and empirical support for future research on consumer behavior. Our results can contribute to determining how the mental imagery quality and imagery elaboration affect consumers’ purchase decision and behavioral intention in different consumption scenarios.