Sound-symbolic signaling of online retailer sizes: The moderating effect of shopping goals

Sound symbolism – the ability of certain phonemes to evoke automatic, implicit associations or meanings – has been documented for a variety of consonants and vowels. However, to date, the literature has not documented shopping-related moderators of sound symbolism, and the role of sound symbolism in online retailing remains understudied. Thus, the present investigation extends the sound symbolism literature into the online retailing domain by investigating size-sound symbolism of online retailers' names and introduces a consumer's given shopping goal (searching versus browsing) as a key moderator of size-sound symbolic effects. The findings of four studies indicate that for names of online retailers, back vowels and voiced consonants lead to greater size perceptions of those retailers than front vowels and voiceless consonants. Further, the findings reveal that, compared to browsers, searchers utilize size-sound symbolism as a filtering heuristic, but the effect does not hold for browsers. Additionally, the findings show that size-sound symbolic effects can influence downstream consumer responses by linking size perceptions as a mediator to patronage intentions. Several implications for theory and practice emerge from the findings.