Is All That Glitters Gold? The Effect of Product Surface Glossiness on Consumer Judgments

Glossiness describes how much the surface of an object reflects light in a specular (i.e. mirror-like) way (Nicodemus et al. 1977). Notwithstanding the importance of glossiness in product design, compared with other visual marketing elements such as shape, color, symmetry and boundary, there is little research on glossiness in the marketing realm, except the work by Meert, Pandelaere, and Patrick (2014), in which they explored the impact of glossiness originating from its biological association with water resources. In an attempt to fill this void, this research proposes that consumers have a general preference for products with a glossy, compared to a matted appearance, an effect which is mediated by psychological newness, and moderated by priming of the inconsistent association, feelings of nostalgia, and durability concerns. Glossiness can be mentally associated with newness due to embodied cognition. Embodied cognition arises when a conceptual metaphor is built up due to the repeated association between a concrete sensory feeling (e.g., visual glossiness in this research) and a more abstract cognition (e.g., psychological newness; e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In particular, we argue that human beings may have learned that glossy things are usually newer. For example, automobiles, jewelry, and tableware can be very glossy when they are newly manufactured, but will become dull after usage and abrasion. Consequently, the mental association between glossiness and newness is established (associative network model; e.g., Wickelgren 1981). Meanwhile, as a pervasive logical fallacy in philosophy, argumentum ad novitatem (appeal to novelty; Bennett 2012) argues that individuals may pursue new things because of a belief that newness implies improvements, even if it is unnecessarily always the case (Jie and Li 2017). Hence, we suggest that the perceived newness induced by glossiness should result in more favorable product evaluations.