Research Reveals When Videos Work
As we put the finishing touches on our recently produced video introduction to Versta Research (see the video below!), I kept wondering whether videos really matter. I don’t jump on bandwagons without strong reasons to believe the wagons are going where I want. So it was a happy coincidence to come across research just published showing that videos do, in fact, make a substantial difference for customers. And the difference they make is for premium products and services rather than commodities.
The research was published in the November 2015 Journal of Marketing. Using a robust data set from Internet retailers, it compared how consumers respond to static images of products and services vs. “dynamic” images, including videos and interactive images that can be zoomed and rotated. Are people more likely to buy? Will they pay more?
The answer is yes, except when the products are purely utilitarian. Showing videos for premium products boosts preference for those products compared to showing static images, and it substantially increases preference for the product compared to a comparable “utilitarian” version with static images.
The authors theorize that videos evoke more imagery, causing “viewers to feel more involved and present in the mediated environment … and thus better able to imagine the experience of using the product.” And this, they suggest, causes a deeper emotional response.
The takeaway for you, our customers, is that you should “present hedonically superior options using dynamic presentation formats.” In plain English, that means sell your bells and whistles with video.
The takeaway for Versta is that our video introduction will indeed give you, our customers, a better, more involved, more vivid sense of who we are and how we work. Now we can show you what you are buying. We think you’ll like what you see. We know you’ll like what you buy.
