tyc86太阳集团青年博士学术工作坊(第八期）

讲座题目：Gazing “Right”: Decoding the Effects of Gaze Directions in Marketing Images with Deep Learning

主讲嘉宾： Zhuping Liu

时间：2024年7月2日（星期二）上午9:00—11:00

地点：tyc86太阳集团305会议室

欢迎感兴趣的师生参加聆听！

tyc86太阳集团

2024年6月28日

主讲嘉宾简介

Zhuping Liu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing Analytics at Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. He holds a PhD in Marketing from University of Texas at Austin, and a MS in Statistics from University of Connecticut. He is interested in examining how market participants employ marketing and non-marketing levels, such as mobile promotions, productimages, and signaling, to influence consumer behaviors and shape market responses. In his research, he uses analytical models, econometric and statistical approaches, and machine learning methods, and often develops innovative models that extend beyond the scope of his current research projects.

He is the recipient of the prestigious Marketing Science Institute’s Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Award and six PSC-CUNY Research Awards. His work has appeared in Journal of Marketing, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Marketing Letters.

讲座主要内容

Human faces are often used in marketing images to promote products in online e-commerce. The real-world effects of gaze directions in such contexts, however, have not been studied in the literature. In this paper, we apply scalable deep learning methods to more than a quarter-million images across 351 brands to detect face presence and gaze directions, and then empirically test their effects on consumer responses. We find that the effects of gaze directions depend on the stages in the purchase funnel. Specifically, gaze directions play an important role in consumers’ click decisions when they are less involved at the high construal level in the browsing stage, but do not significantly influence their decisions when consumers are highly involved at the low construal level in the conversion stage. In addition, not all gaze directions are “created equal”: Right gaze has the strongest effect on clicks, with an effect size almost as twice as big as direct gaze, while left gaze and downward gaze do not have significant effects. These results are supported by the Spatial Agency Bias theory with the construal level as a moderator. Overall, our results indicate that marketers should decompose “averted” gaze into left, right, downward directions, and consider their effects at the two different stages in the purchase funnel.