MAJCAFE

Rosidah Musa
Institute of Business Excellence, Universiti Teknologi MARA

Janiffa Saidon
Faculty Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA

Noreldzaihan Mohd Rais
Arshad Ayub Graduate Business School, Universiti Teknologi MARA

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Abstract

Today, social media networks have emerged as the primary source of inspiration and influence on the consumer purchase decision. Due to the ever-changing consumer media consumption behaviour, most brand owners would allocate a considerable amount of resources to create impactful content for their advertisement. However, there is little research that empirically investigates elements of advertisement content that evoke the initial attention and interest of the target audience. Against this backdrop, this study was motivated to investigate the element in advertisement content that would evoke the audience’s initial attention within the first 10 seconds of exposure to the stimulus. Consequently, this study aimed to unlock the specific element in the advertisement content as the point of interest (i.e. main focus) among experimental subjects in the experiment. The stimuli of this research consisted of four leading Muslimah fashion brand advertisements, which were posted on social media platforms. The experiment commenced by using an eye tracker device to track the subject’s eye movement patterns when exposed to the advertisement. This was followed by performing a postexperiment interview. Two types of analysis generated from the eye tracker experiment were then employed to address the research objectives, namely Gaze Plot and Time to First Fixation. The eye-tracker findings were validated against the post-experiment interview results. Surprisingly, the research findings implied that at the first one second, most of the subjects looked at the model face, which contradicted the outcomes derived from the postexperiment interview and prior findings. The implications and limitations of this research and future research directions are duly discussed in detail.

Keywords: Eye tracker, Advertisement content, Social media advertisement, Purchase intention, Digital marketing