It Looks Like “Theirs”: When and Why Human Presence in the Photo Lowers Viewers’ Liking and Preference for an Experience Venue (2024)

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Volume 51 Issue 2 August 2024
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Zoe Y Lu

Please address correspondence to Zoe Y. Lu. Email: ylu22@tulane.edu

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Suyeon Jung

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Joann Peck

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Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 51, Issue 2, August 2024, Pages 321–341, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad059

Published:

22 September 2023

Article history

Published:

22 September 2023

Corrected and typeset:

01 November 2023

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Abstract

Consumers and marketers often post photos of experiential consumption online. While prior research has studied how human presence in social media images impacts viewers’ responses, the findings are mixed. The present research advances the current understanding by incorporating viewers’ need for self-identity into their response model. Six studies, including an analysis of field data (14,725 Instagram photos by a top travel influencer) and five controlled experiments, find that the presence (vs. absence) of another human in the photo of an identity-relevant experience (e.g., a vacation, a wedding) can lower viewers' liking and preference for the venue (i.e., the vacation destination, the wedding venue) in the photo. This effect is mediated by viewers' feelings of others' ownership of the venue and moderated by the relevance of the experience to the viewer’s self-identity as well as the distinctiveness of the human in the photo. This research is the first to investigate the impact of human presence in shared photos through the lens of psychological ownership and the identity-signaling function of ownership. The findings offer practical insights into when marketers should avoid human presence in advertisem*nts and how to mitigate the negative impact of human presence in online photos.

experiential consumption, field data, image analysis, psychological ownership, self-identity

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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Editor: Margaret C Campbell,

Margaret C Campbell

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Andrew T Stephen

Andrew T Stephen

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Associate Editor: Andrew T Stephen

Andrew T Stephen

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