Show me insides: Investigating the influences of product exploded view on consumers’ mental imagery, comprehension, attitude, and purchase intention

With the popularity of e-commerce, consumers purchase durable products online more frequently. In order to effectively communicate information about products, various product presentation formats have been developed (e.g., 3D views, 360-degree rotatable views, and enlarged pictures). This study focuses on the usage of exploded view in digital product presentation. Exploded view clearly shows what technical components are included in a product, where these components are positioned, and how these technical components are assembled. Seeing internal components could facilitate consumers processing of product function and attributes, but it might be overwhelming for consumer processing. To understand how exploded view influences consumer processing, this study investigates the influence of product function description (concrete vs. abstract) and product view (normal vs. exploded view) on consumers' comprehension, attitude and purchase intention. Drawing on construct-level theory, we expect the construal congruence between product view and textual description makes positive effects. Through two controlled experiments (N = 815), results demonstrate that the influence of product view changes with abstractness of description. When processing concrete product descriptions, participants' imagery vividness was facilitated by exploded view, which further led to enhanced comprehension, improved attitude and higher purchased intention. When encountering abstract product descriptions, normal product view led to higher comprehension and attitude. Mental imagery vividness mediated the interaction influence between textual descriptions and pictorial views. These results provide guidelines for marketers’ effective usage of exploded views in e-commerce contexts.