Online Branding and Marketing: A User Perspective.

Multimodal is quite established as communication metaphor in user interfaces and there is at least some limited prima facie case that can be used to influence positively consumer behaviour. This paper explores the perceptions of users to interactive multimodal e-branding and its effect on the consumer purchase decision. A sample of 200 respondents, was used as a basis to explore marketing techniques on social media and multimodal influence on consumer purchase decisions. The results and their analysis indicated that advertisements or messages to users with audio, video and text on in combination are the most effective forms of compiling multimodal messages that aim to advertise, persuade and eventually lead to a purchase on the e-commerce and social media platforms. The data also pointed to the use of multimodal Virtual Shopping Assistants. These findings provide an overall viewpoint on user perception that can be used as a basis for a series of empirical experiments in simulations to identify the specific user influence under particular user context and multimodal messages.