Measuring the Sales Impact of Cognitive vs Emotional Priming in Wine Tourism: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This study investigates whether cognitive or emotional informational priming better drives purchase intention among wine tourists in a direct-to-consumer setting. Through a randomized field experiment conducted at a premium Valpolicella winery, two groups received contrasting pre-tasting digital content: one focused on emotional storytelling, the other on technical and attribute-based data. Results show that cognitive priming generated a significantly higher mean purchase intention (M=5.94) compared to emotional priming (M=4.65), representing a 27.7% increase confirmed by a robust ANOVA (F=30.4, p<.001). A complementary lexical analysis of the tasting speech revealed its intrinsically narrative nature, suggesting that cognitive priming acted as a complementary "technical scaffold" rather than redundant information. The findings support the "Cognitive Alibi" hypothesis: rational, data-driven framing lowers the psychological cost of hedonic spending, offering wineries a scalable, low-cost strategy to improve conversion without restructuring the visitor experience.