Love pets, love their owners? - the transmission effect of consumers' warmth perception of pet images on B & B

ABSTRACT

Due to changes in consumption trends, the pet economy(e.g., buying, feeding, and caring for pets) has emerged in recent years. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers have become eager to alleviate stress and anxiety through interactions with animals. Consumer interest in adopting pets is growing, along with a surge in the adoption rate. The rapid rise of the pet economy has also fueled the development of related industries, such as the food industry, medical industry, and Internet industry. Therefore, integrating pets into consumer experience and marketing communication has received increasing attention. Pets can give people a warm feeling. In the hospitality industry, it is important for service personnel to make customers feel at home. Previous studies have mainly focused on how to improve the service quality of employees to make customers feel more warmth from the perspective of human characteristics(e.g., expression, appearance). However, in the current context of the pet economy, pets, cute, warm and therapeutic, have been applied to the hospitality industry. They bring customers a novel accommodation experience as housekeepers. What if these clues of warmth are shown to consumers in advance in the marketing process of B&B? Can they influence consumers' attitudes? In other words, in the online marketing of B&B, can pets be used as a carrier of warmth to transfer consumers' warm perception of pets to warm impressions of service personnel, and can pet images become a key clue to influence consumers' consumption decisions? If so, what is the mechanism?At present, academic research in this area is still insufficient. Against this background, three experiments were designed to verify the warmth transmission effect of pets, as well as its psychological mechanism(i.e., perceived social presence) and the boundary condition(i.e., an individual's attitude towards pets). In experiment 1, text material was used to conduct a simulation experiment. Differences in customers' perception of the warmth attribute of the B&B host(main service personnel of B&B) under two conditions(with and without cute pet images) were compared to verify the main effect that pet images have a positive impact on consumers' perception of the warmth of the B&B host. In experiment 2, a situational experiment was conducted with pictures of pet dogs to verify the main effect again. Meanwhile, the internal mechanism of the pet warmth transmission effect was also analyzed. The study revealed the mediating effect of perceived social presence. In experiment 3, it was found that the boundary condition of the pet warmth transmission effect is consumers' different attitudes towards pets after replacing pictures of pet dogs with those of cats. To conclude,firstly, compared with pictures of the B&B environment without pets, those with pets can enhance the customer's warmth perception of the host. Additionally, the increase in perceived social presence is the key psychological mechanism of the pet warmth transmission effect. Finally, the more positive the attitude of consumers toward pets, the more likely they can perceive the evidence of the social presence of the B&B host and improve their perception of the warmth impression of the host. Unlike previous studies from the perspective of individual characteristics of service personnel, this paper took pets, the appendage of service providers, as the research object to explore the influence of pets on customers' impression and perception of the B&B host. Also, it revealed the internal mechanism and boundary condition of the warmth transmission effect. These findings provide B&B operators with a fresh marketing perspective and have practical significance in promoting the integration of the pet economy and hospitality industry.