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1. Introduction
The increasing enthusiasm of web-surfers for commercial websites, also called online stores, no doubt contributed to e-commerce development. Understanding web-surfers’ exposure is then a major challenge for researchers and marketing practitioners. The ability of a commercial website to stimulate internet senses may gear their behaviour while surfing. It seems to be accepted that atmospheric elements of a website, defined as “various stimuli, such as colour, sound, scent, taste, layout and space, which are important clues for buyers” (Oh et al., 2008), considerably affect web-surfers’ behaviour (Manganari et al., 2011), especially those enhancing its vividness (Wu et al., 2008; Ching and Tong, 2013). Among the first atmospheric elements noticed by web-surfers is the dominant colour of the website, in particular its background colour (Gorn et al., 2004). This latter significantly contributes to its vividness (Ettis, 2008) and seems to affect web-surfers’ responses, especially conative ones (Gorn et al., 2004).
Note that among the different variants of colour, the hue dimension is often chosen by researchers because of its broad managerial interest (Bellizzi et al., 1983; Gorn et al., 2004; Cheng et al., 2009). However, studies of web-surfers’ conative reactions to colour, or even to commercial websites’ dominant colour, are rare and they report mixed results. The observed differences could be explained by presence of mediators not taken into account in previous research. In this regard, some researchers have noted that the dominant colour of online stores affects web-surfers’ conative reactions through affecting their internal states (Ettis, 2008; Wu et al., 2008). Among these potentially important internal states to consider, mental imagery appears to play a central role in articulating the influence of websites’ vividness on web-surfers’ conative responses (Kiss and Esch, 2006; Argyriou, 2012).
Websites’ atmosphere seems to be a fertile ground for the activation of mental imagery (Volle, 2000). The latter has the capacity of inciting the individual into action thanks to the concrete aspect of imagined scenarios (MacInnis and Price, 1987). Moreover, Bolls and Muehling (2007) believe that mental imagery has the specificity of being fully triggered when a limited number of sensory modalities is activated. According to the authors, simultaneous arousal of several senses causes interaction between them compromising thus clarity of...