Merchandising/Marketing/Retailing: Management

When Pictures and Words Match: Impact of Congruity in Online Reviews and its Impact on Apparel Rental

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Abstract

This study investigates how congruity between textual and visual information in multimodal online reviews influences consumer evaluations in the apparel rental market. Drawing on schema congruity theory, we analyze 20,489 Rent-the-Runway reviews using BLIP-2 image captioning and cosine-based text–image similarity scores, along with sentiment analysis. Results show that higher text–image congruity significantly increases positive sentiment and elevates star ratings, even after controlling for shopping purpose, review length, BMI, product price, and review date. These findings demonstrate that coherent verbal–visual cues shape consumers’ interpretation of product experiences. The study highlights the importance for marketers to encourage reviewers to provide aligned text and images.

Keywords: online reviews, text mining, image processing, fashion renting

How to Cite:

Lee, Y. & Ha, S., (2025) “When Pictures and Words Match: Impact of Congruity in Online Reviews and its Impact on Apparel Rental”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 82(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.21618