The Effect of Human Images in Advertisements on Consumer Attention by Product Type and Gender: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

In today’s competitive marketing environment getting through the clutter to get the customer’s attention is very important. It could be said that the first purpose of a successful advertisement is to get the attention of the consumer since it would not be possible to talk about purchase motivation without establishing the attention of the consumer. For this purpose, having a better understanding of the factors that have the potential to make advertisements more attractive is important. Thus, the purpose of this study was to identify if the usage of human images in advertisements changed areas of interest towards advertisements and if gender and the advertised product type (hedonic or utilitarian) influenced the findings. For this purpose, an eye-tracking technique was carried out on 42 volunteers. Findings suggested that the use of human images for hedonic product advertisements shorten the time to the first fixation; however, it has been determined that visual elements without human images for utilitarian product advertisements have been noticed more quickly for both female and male participants. Thus, it may be more effective to design hedonistic product advertisements by using human images and utilitarian product advertisements without human images. The usage of human image plays a distraction role for utilitarian product advertisements.

Keywords

• Advertisement
• human image
• eye-tracking technique

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