The Effects of Personality Traits and Processing Fluency on Visual Social Media Content

Social media’s increasing popularity among people and its multipurpose capacity of entertainment, information and consumption has made businesses and marketers increase their presence in them in order to reach consumers and promote their products to them. In order to attract consumers, they make use of different strategies and one of them is with visual elements. Visual elements’ appeal to users has increased their adoption in posts, which led to intense competition between businesses for the attention of consumers. Businesses use different kinds of visual elements, such as product visualizations, so that they will intrigue consumers. The perceptual fluency of those product visualizations can influence the attitude of the users so, marketers have to be aware of who their customers and followers are in social media. By knowing what type of product visualizations attract their customers they will be able to design them in such a way that are more effective in order to influence their attitudes positively. The two theoretical frameworks that are relevant with exploring the effects that the types of product visualizations have on consumers are processing fluency, along with its relevant subconstruct perceptual fluency, and two personality traits. Processing fluency refers to the ease or difficulty with which an individual can process information, while perceptual fluency is the ease with which an individual comprehends the perceptual features of a stimulus (Labroo and Pocheptsova 2016). However, the way that fluency is formed into easy or difficult processing is highly subjective for each person. Thus, the two relevant personality traits are need for cognition and sensation seeking, which because of them different people can process information in different ways. Therefore, in order to explore how personality traits and perceptual fluency affect consumers attitude toward visual social media content, the influence of each of these constructs was investigated. The results of the correlation analysis unexpectedly showed that there was not a relationship between each of the personality traits with attitude but exhibited a relationship between perceptual fluency and attitude. These findings were further confirmed and reinforced from the results of the multiple regression analysis, which demonstrated that need for cognition and sensation seeking were not predictors of attitude, in contrast with perceptual fluency which appeared to be a significant predictor of and have a positive relationship with attitude. Overall, it has been established that perceptual fluency should be considered by marketers when designing their product visualizations. Marketing professionals who try to manage the ever-evolving social media environment could leverage the information provided by this research and use it strategically to reduce the effort and stimulate fluent processing so that if consumers perceive a product visualization as easy to recognize and comprehend, their attitudes towards it will be more positive