For many brands, offering valuable and original experiences for customers is the main means of gaining awareness, image values and hence, strategic competitive advantage. Brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, BONOBOS and Victoria’s Secret have understood the opportunities offered by experiential marketing as a new philosophy of thinking, conceiving and proposing a marketing offer. This challenge is as important for online fashion brands that target millennial customers considered as internet addicts (Bergman et al., 2005) always looking for information, exhibitionism and enjoyable online experiences. With the growth of online fashion shopping it is important that fashion retailers pay attention to the relationship between specific website quality dimensions and customer satisfaction (Kim and Stoel, 2004). Fashion brands must go beyond the vision of the website as a medium of information to a medium of entertaining proposing additional extraordinary and optimal experiences for these customers. As noted by Kim (2007), online fashion retailers need to be able to communicate the product information virtually in order to create accurate product perceptions for consumers who are visiting their website. Thus, the main question is “what are the elements of the website which could help achieve these aims?”

There has been little empirical research which focuses on how information features affect consumers` commitments to a shopping site on the web (Park and Kim, 2006). Consequently,the main aim of this paper is to further research in the domain by illustrating how the online fashion brand provides a valuable shopping, consuming and cognitive experience that fits with the consumer’s expectations aligning these with the extraordinary and symbolic world of the brand. From this perspective, the website of the brand – due to its multisensory, interactive and hyper-mediatized nature – can be a very effective digital support for achieving these goals. It represents the virtual environment that enables the brand to create and open up a universe that transcribes its functional, experiential and symbolic values. From the consumer’s psychological perspective, this online communication strategy questions the psychological process that underlines the perception, elaboration and reactions of the consumer during his online experience: To this is end, it is relevant to focus on the influences of the usability of the website on the attributes of the mental images the consumer experiences and the moderating role that brand attitude and involvement in the product category could have in this. Also, based on MacInnis and Price (1987) recommendations, it is relevant to analyze the role the consumer’s style of processing could have in this process. Thus, the research questions are: How do the attributes of the website impact the mental imagery experience of the consumer during his/her website visit?; and what are the consequences of these psychological reactions on the consumer’s post-visit attitude and behavior.

In attempt to respond to these questions, we explore the psychological process that underlies consumer online behavior. We draw on the literature which emphasizes the link between the website attributes and the imagery processing of the online consumer. We present and empirically test our conceptual model within the current quantitative study. We follow with a discussion of our results and presentation of the implications of our study for theory and practice.

• Imed Ben Nasr(La Rochelle Business School, France)
• Kenneth R Deans(La Rochelle Business School, France)
• Lisa Thomas(Neoma Business School, France)