The moderating role of user motivation in Internet access and individuals' responses to a Website
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a proposal for the Hierarchy of Effects – a model that has been widely applied in the study of persuasion in traditional communications media – to evaluate Website effectiveness. In particular, this contribution seeks to consider a more complete model in order to evaluate the responses of the individuals to the Websites, incorporating new variables to the traditional sequence; and to study the moderating effect of the specific characteristics of the audience – the individual user's motivations in terms of Internet access in the basic structure of this model.
Design/methodology/approach
The multi‐equations methodology is used to test the sequence of responses that produce the visit to an experimental Website: the perceived informative value and the perceived entertainment value of a Website, the attitude toward the Website, the attitude toward the brand and the intention to buy the brand for two different individual groups: the “information seekers” and “entertainment seekers”.
Findings
The results reveal two well differentiated positive models of behavior in the online context.
Practical implications
In their Website strategies, the organizations should not neglect those aspects which may arouse emotional reactions in the Internet users, but they should pay more attention to generated informative value to obtain more favorable users' responses.
Originality/value
Previous studies had not tested empirically the moderating effects of the users' motivations in terms of Internet access (search for information versus entertainment) over this original and more complete structure of individuals' responses to the Website.
Keywords
Citation
San José‐Cabezudo, R., Gutiérrez‐Cillán, J. and Gutiérrez‐Arranz, A.M. (2008), "The moderating role of user motivation in Internet access and individuals' responses to a Website", Internet Research, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 393-404. https://doi.org/10.1108/10662240810897808
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited