Visual Attention During Brand Choice: The Impact of Time Pressure and Task Motivation

Measures derived from eye-movement data reveal that during brand choice consumers adapt to time pressure by accelerating the visual scanning sequence, by filtering information and by changing their scanning strategy. In addition, consumers with high task motivation filter brand information less and pictorial information more. Consumers under time pressure filter textual ingredient information more, and pictorial information less. The results of a conditional logit analysis reveal that the chosen brand receives significantly more intra-brand and inter-brand saccades and longer fixation durations than non-chosen brands, independent of time pressure and task motivation conditions. Implications for the theory of consumer attention and for pretesting of packaging and shelf lay-outs are discussed.