Search results

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of web-surfers’ conative reactions to websites’ dominant hue by taking into account mental imagery’s role.

A conceptual model considering mental imagery as a mediator of web-surfers conative reactions to websites’ dominant hue was tested. It also supposes that mental imagery promoted by websites’ dominant hue is moderated by web-surfers’ involvement towards the product sold. To validate this model, an online experiment was conducted with a sample of 400 web-surfers.

Results reflect the importance of “vividness/clarity” and “valence” dimensions of mental imagery. In fact, hues congruent with the website’s content seem to be more able to generate vivid and positive mental images which affect positively web-surfers’ conative reactions. However, this relationship is reversed when web-surfers are strongly involved with the product sold.

Although this study focused on a particular product category, the obtained results can help the research community to understand better conative reactions of web-surfers to websites’ dominant hue through the consideration of mental imagery’s role.

Findings can help managers to better the performance of their commercial websites through the choice of the adequate background hue.

This study highlights the importance of mental imagery prompted by dominant website’s hue taking into account its congruence degree with the website’s content. It provides empirical evidence about its mediating role.

This paper aims to determine the effect of the congruence between a website's background color and its context (product category) on online trust and resulting behavioral intentions in emerging markets.

An online experiment, conducted on 240 web-surfers, compared two versions of a website (high vs low color-context congruence) in terms of online trust and resulting behavioral intentions. The authors also studied the moderating role of the online shopping experience on the color-context congruence impact on online trust.

Results revealed that a website's color-context congruence enhances online trust. The authors have also demonstrated that online trust plays a mediating role in the relationship between color-context congruence and behavioral intentions. Moreover, they found out that the influence of the color-context congruence on online trust is enhanced when the web-surfer is highly experienced in online shopping.

This research contributes to fill in the theoretical gaps and to better understand the influence of color-context congruence on online trust and behavioral intentions in emerging markets. Indeed, past studies had focused on the color impact on online trust without taking into consideration congruence with the website context. However, this study is limited to a single category of products (tourist products) and only two colors (blue and red) were manipulated in the experiment.

This study highlights the importance of selecting a background's color that matches with the sold product category to reassure web-surfers so that they trust the commercial website and express some favorable intentions like buying.

Prior studies had focused on the website's color effect on online trust neglecting color-context congruence. Our study helps to highlight the importance of selecting background colors matching the product category.

This study chooses the content perception perspective to develop a theoretical model portraying the psychological activities of Web surfers exposed to content Web sites. After collecting 549 empirical observations in a controlled lab environment, tests the theoretical relationships by using the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. The results strongly indicate that effective content perceptual dimensions can help content Web surfers to develop positive attitudes toward content sites, which in turn induce favorable behavioral outcomes such as frequent site usage and loyalty. Such a proposed theoretical model not only has the potential to enrich the theoretical underpinning of Internet studies but also presents a practical framework to guide content strategy formulations for the online content industry. Detailed implications for both managerial research and practice are discussed.

A good web site has a purpose for the designer who wrote the page, the editor who maintains it and the Web surfer who finds it. One can think about this by paraphrasing and restating Ranganathan‘s Five Laws of Library Science, beginning with this one: “Web sites are for use.” A Web site without without a potential audience is pointless; a purposeless Web site will have no audience.

The traditional work of reference librarians has been greatly impacted by access to electronic publications on the World Wide Web. Reference librarians are also using the Web to create electronic publications for in‐library users and Web surfers. By creating HTML documents that provide access to Web and other electronic resources, reference service is extended beyond the physical library and designated reference desk hours, opening the building for 24‐hour access.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution and transformation of tourism distribution channels, focusing on the role the internet has played in such a process. It attempts to graphically illustrate, in a temporal manner, the evolving complexity of the tourism distribution systems.

This paper provides insights into the change of the structure of tourism distribution that has not been extensively explored. Indeed, the complexity of the tourism distribution structure has been diagrammatically depicted multiple times by previous researchers and each depiction has contributed to a fuller understanding of the body of knowledge by focusing on different aspects of that structure. This paper builds upon those valuable knowledge contributions by focusing on the evolution of the structure over time, systematically and diagrammatically revealing the progressively larger number of intermediation layers, in spite of concurrent disintermediation and reintermediation activity. This paper does not focus on every action of every participant in detail, but rather focuses on categories of intermediaries, looking at pioneering examples of each. Likewise, the comparative rates of technology adoption in different regions of the world are not investigated.

The complex network proposed in this paper indicates that the advance of information and communication technology has not reduced the number of intermediaries in the distribution channel, but rather resulted in an increasingly complex array of intermediaries. The structure of the tourism industry has taken the form of a complex global network. In the struggle to prosper in this environment, participants at various levels will continue to compete, cooperate, merge, form partnerships, and change relationships on a regular basis.

The extant literature has covered many aspects of intermediation, disintermediation, and reintermediation, albeit with differing terminologies. Most of these studies have adopted a static and cross‐sectional approach in examining the structure and use of tourism distribution channels. This paper examines the historical evolution and progression of tourism distribution channels which is not only important in understanding where we are now as an industry, but also where we came from and where we are heading to.

There are two main objectives of the paper. First, in a systematic and statistically rigorous manner, we attempt to descriptively document the types and nature of marketing information on commercial home‐pages, with a view to identifying the major objectives of contemporary commercial Web sites that pre‐dominate the Web. Using Resnik and Stern’s “information content” paradigm, we evaluate the informativeness of commercial home pages. Second, we attempt to empirically examine various important factors of commercial home‐pages that lead to increased visits, or hit‐rates. The identification of hit‐rate determinants is likely to be of great value, both to Web page designers and to the many small and large firms seeking to establish their presence on the Web.

The Internet has caused an information explosion and created a need to efficiently determine the relevance of information. This paper describes a system named Jamaica, which profiles the interest of a Web surfer. Jamaica searches desired information using different search engines. The hits are verified to eradicate erroneous links and duplicated documents. Refinement is carried out to customize and rank the results. Jamaica is built on a client‐server architecture, achieving a compact, independent information profiler. Results of an evaluation carried out against a number of commercial search engines are shown to illustrate that Jamaica is able to obtain more relevant information compared to a single search engine.

This article aims to analyse how environmentalist NGOs build the figures of guilty and evil businesses in texts published on the web sites of two ironic prizes. These texts are good examples of criticism based on reversing and analysing semiotic productions of organisations, like advertising and environmental reports, as a part of on‐line environmentalist campaigns.

The article is based on textual semiotics and a semiotic‐based approach to rhetoric; the methodology is qualitative and exploratory. A part of the text published on the web sites of the two ironic prizes (Pinocchio and Angry Mermaid) are analysed in order to identify different models and strategies of criticism.

The article identifies a series of critical strategies: semantic/paradigmatic, syntagmatic/meta‐textual, referential, narrative and inter‐textual criticisms. It underlines the fact that on‐line criticism is an anti‐ideological semiotic action, which can be compared to some forms of ecological thought. Nonetheless, it is based on some forms of rhetoric and ideology, which can be analysed with semiotic tools.

This paper presents a qualitative, exploratory analysis of two cases: results cannot be directly generalized, but methodology and findings can be transferred to other cases (epistemological principle of transferability).

Methods and results of this paper can help in enriching research on the rhetoric of environmental communication, and can integrate more quantitative approaches. Results can suggest new approaches to business communicators, in order to avoid environmental criticism and “boomerang effects”.

The attempt to apply semiotics to the analysis of communication campaigns is rare and perhaps quite innovative. The approach can enrich the fields of PR and business communication studies, of rhetoric analysis and of environmental communication analysis.