The Effect of Consumer Emotions on Online Purchasing Behavior

Introduction

Businesses target certain feelings, values, and emotions in consumers in order to achieve competitive advantage, to make their ads memorable and to ensure that consumers select the product offered by them. In this case, the fundamental aim is to create the attitudes and actions on buying behavior of consumers. It has been proved that almost all of the purchases made by consumers are done with their emotional motivation. For this reason, it is clear that companies need to give a place emotional content in order to provide a competitive advantage. To achieve this, a company follows the steps such as; to determine the consumer's needs and desires, to develop a marketing communication strategy that can position the product emotionally and establish a relationship between consumer emotions and the concrete product features. Almost every product offers similar advantages. For this reason, firms take steps to create strategies parallel to consumer sentiments and, above all, emphasizes the values related to the inner desires, wants and ambitions of potential customers. Therefore, the secret of business is to create an emotional relationship between the consumer and the product. Studies argued that the attention of consumers would be drawn not by logical arguments but by creating images that created emotions. Therefore, the more intense the emotion, the deeper the neurological connection in the brain of the consumer. In this sense, companies have the goal of eliminating expectations with products that can address consumer feelings. Therefore, it is necessary to know how the consumers think, what the consumers feel and what emotions can be produced to reveal their dreams. In other words, firms should leave a mark on the consumer in order to be catchy, to create consumer loyalty and to turn potential customers into existing customers. The way to achieve this is to stimulate the networks that create a sense of pleasure and goodness in the consumer.

In this study, first of all, it has been examined whether there is a statistically significant difference between online purchasing behavior and demographic variables. Then, the factors affecting the consumer's emotions in the online shopping channel has been revealed. For this, it has benefited from the scale developed by Park and Kim (2003). The factors discussed in this scale are; user interface quality, product information quality, service information quality, site awareness, security perception, information satisfaction, and relational benefit. The scale developed by Laros and Steenkamp (2003) was used to determine how the aforementioned factors affect consumer emotions. The factors have been discussed in this scale are; anger, fear, sadness, shame, contentment, and happiness. Finally, the impact of these emotional factors on online purchasing behavior have been measured in this study.