The Effects of Virtual Product Experience on Changing Consumers’ First Impression Bias

Abstract

Recommendation agents have been seen as one of the most powerful Website marketing techniques due to their ability to facilitate consumers’ online purchase decisions. However, in a modern society within which information is exchanged and transmitted quickly, it is quite often the case that consumers have already received product information from different sources before they browse recommendation agents’ messages on the Website. That is, the first impression bias toward a specific product may already exist in the consumer’s mind when they read the Website message that is trying to persuade them to buy that product. Is the message delivered by recommendation agents able to change such bias and achieve its intended benefit: persuading consumers to buy from the Website? By integrating the theory of first impression bias, the elaboration likelihood model and virtual product experience, this study has developed and empirically examined a research model proposing that the virtual product experience can improve the recommendation agents’ argument quality and source credibility, by which consumers’ first impression bias can be changed.