This study investigates how consumers’ information-seeking motivation and perceptions of cross-media campaigns influence their attitudes toward innovative products. Drawing from the perspective of interactive marketing, it highlights the role of consumer–brand interaction in shaping product evaluation and acceptance. The findings indicate that when consumers perceive a product as highly innovative, they tend to experience both curiosity and uncertainty. This activates their need for information-seeking, which subsequently increases their engagement with cross-media campaigns designed with interactive marketing elements. Through this process, consumers develop more favorable attitudes toward the product. The results also reveal a significant dual mediation effect between perceived innovativeness and product attitude, mediated by the need for information-seeking and perception of cross-media campaigns. Although each path may not independently reach significance, the combined sequential mechanism—where consumers actively explore and interact with brand content—plays a critical role in shaping product attitudes.

Sensory experiences affect individuals’ judgment and behavior through the metaphors that experiences carry. The literature has demonstrated that the perception of warmth activates concepts related to positive meaning and metaphors, such as consideration and gentleness, which increase individuals’ tendency to help or relate to others. This study hypothesized that warm olfactory stimuli influence intention toward prosocial behavior by increasing the need for social connectedness (NSC). The first experiment (n = 123) demonstrated that the actual warm scent increased participants’ intentions for prosocial behavior and that the effect of the actual warm scent was mediated by NSC. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a second experiment (n = 995) was conducted the showed that warm scent simulated via visual stimuli (i.e., a multimodal approach) led to prosocial behavior intention as well. The results of the study provide academic and managerial insights into how to improve prosocial behavior intention, which is essential for the sustainable development of societies.

Innovation is no longer the purview of high-tech industries; it is blossoming in the home appliances and cosmetics sectors. However, consumers’ anxiety about the risk of new products prevents them from reaping the benefits of innovation. This anxiety is driven by customer’s lack of prior information on new products. This study examines how difference age between the chronological age of consumers and their cognitive age affects consumers’ willingness to search for information on innovative products, leading to reduced new-product anxiety. According to a survey of participants who actually bought an innovative product, we found that participants searched for more information when they perceived themselves to be younger than their chronological age (a high difference age). Where participants did not proactively search for information (due to a low difference age), they could be encouraged to do this through marketing campaigns. Together, these findings expand our understanding of how consumers’ difference age can be leveraged in digital marketing to enable companies to more strategically reach consumers when planning or launching innovative products.