Taking Hold

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Shoppers often pause while perusing the supermarket shelves, product in hand, mulling their next purchase. Touch has long been considered an important aspect of product evaluation – for instance, in increasing choice of the product – and the reason people touch products is usually down to one of two factors. 

“Either it’s an autotelic issue – so it’s touch as a fun factor – or it’s an instrumental factor, so it provides information for the buyer, ” says Mathias Streicher, from the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

But new research conducted by Streicher and Zachary Estes, from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy, shows that grasping a product also affects a person’s choice of other products on display – not just the one being held. Their study found that holding a source product increases the visual fluency of a haptically similar product – so a shopper is more likely to buy a product that is the same shape as ...