The Effect of Mobile Image Exaggeration on Product Attitude

Abstract : This study investigated how the image exaggeration influence consumer attitude toward product in mobileshopping. Image exaggeration was manipulated by adding light effects on image and adjusting the width for slender mirroreffect. Subjects were randomly allocated to four mock-mobile website stimuli. The overall results showed that the imageexaggeration had negative effect on product attitude mediated by diagnositicity. First, the mediation effect of diagnositicitybetween exaggeration and product attitude was tested by bootstap method. The diagnositicity fully mediated between twovariables and exaggeration had negative total effect on diagnositicity. The image exaggeration had no direct effect on prod-uct attitude. Second, to test the moderating effect of image congruence between the image exaggeration and diagnositicity,conditional indirect effect of diagnositicity was analyzed. As a result, the moderating effect of image congruence was sig-nificant. When consumers perceived high self-image congruence with picture image on mobile website, the exaggerationhad no negative effect on product attitude. This indicates self-image congruence counteracts the negative effect of theexaggeration on diagositicity. And the moderating effect of image aesthetics between the image exaggeration and productattitude was examinated by the conditional direct effect model. The analysis found that image aesthetics had significantmoderating effects particularly on high or low levels of aesthetics. When image aesthetics was perceived as high, imageexaggeration had negative effect on product attitude, whereas image aesthetics was low, image exaggeration had positiveeffect on product attitude. This result indicated that the positive exaggeration effects existed when images were aes-thetically appealing. Key words :mobile shopping (모바일 쇼핑), image exaggeration (이미지 왜곡), diagnositicity (진단성), imagecongruence (이미지 일치성), image aesthetics (이미지 심미성)