The Power of Beauty: Leveraging on Deep Learning to Disentangle the effect of Image Aesthetics on Online Purchase

Visuals have been deemed as one of the primary marketing formats in service e-tailing environments to compensate for the abstract and intangible nature of services. Yet, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence attesting to the importance of aesthetics in product and website designs, there is a dearth of research on how the beauty of images depicting service offerings could affect consumers’ behaviour. Subscribing to Stimuli-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, we attempt to elucidate the power of aesthetics in shaping consumers’ cognitive and emotional responses when they are exposed to the portal image of a service offering. Additionally, we endeavour to explore the heterogeneity of consumers’ responses or their centrality of visual aesthetics, to such images. Blending computer vision and deep learning techniques, we advance a computable and decomposable aesthetic assessment method for scoring the aesthetics of portal images belonging to more than 299,000 local service offerings on a leading Chinese group buying site. We then employ Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to yield initial evidence demonstrating that aesthetics exerts significant effects on the online sales of services.

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