دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله تاثیر فرهنگ، عواطف، نامشهودی و نشانه های جوی روی رفتار آنلاین (نشریه الزویر 2013)

تاثیر فرهنگ، عواطف، نامشهودی و نشانه های جوی روی رفتار آنلاین

The influence of culture, emotions, intangibility, and atmospheric cues on online behavior

Abstract

This paper examines how emotions and website atmospheric cues influence service tangibility and consumer attitudes. The proposed model was compared across three cultures: North America (Canada and U.S.), China, and the Middle East. The findings support the overall model and demonstrate several non-invariant paths across the groups. Particularly, the results suggest how the influences of two emotional dimensions (pleasure and dominance) on consumer perceptions of site atmospherics vary across cultures. Moreover, the effects of service tangibility dimensions (physical tangibility, specificity, and mental tangibility) on consumers’ attitudes toward the website and service vary significantly across the three cultures. Mental tangibility has the greatest influence on North American customers’ attitudes, while physical tangibility and specificity have the greatest impact on Chinese and Middle Eastern customers’ attitudes, respectively.

1 Introduction

“Globalization and technology have combined to create a target marketplace mediated through the internet, which is truly international in scope” (Jin, 2010, 253). The last two decades saw an exponential growth in internet usage. In 1990 fewer than 1 million users were connected to the internet, but this number rapidly escalated to reach 1.6 billion by May of 2009 (Hill, 2011). E-commerce sales continually soar and the internet is becoming an equalizer, eliminating the constraints of location, scale, and time zones, while allowing firms, both large and small, to expand globally at a cost lower than ever before.

Several studies have developed online consumer behavior models and investigated the influence of website atmospherics on consumer behavior (Dailey, 2004; Eroglu, Machleit, & Davis, 2001, 2003; Hausman & Siekpe, 2009; Mummalaneni, 2005; Richard, 2005). Most of these studies adopted the Mehrabian and Russell (1974) Stimuli–Organism–Response (SOR) framework to explore the antecedents and consequences of website atmospherics. Based on the SOR framework, Eroglu et al. (2001) proposed that website atmospherics influence customers’ emotional variables, which induce consumers’ approach or avoidance behavior. More recently, Mazaheri, Richard, and Laroche (2011) developed a comprehensive model of online consumer behavior that included emotional and cognitive variables. They proposed that customers’ emotions (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) are associated with the perceptions of site atmospherics (site informativeness, effectiveness, and entertainment), which in turn, influence site attitudes and involvement, product attitudes, and purchase intentions.

Zeithamal, Parasuraman, and Malhotra (2002) suggested that the website allows consumers to “make assumptions about the service’s quality”. Similarly, Eggert (2006) stated that companies must reduce customers’ risk involved in purchasing a service, primarily by offering a “tangible” proof of quality and by “tangibilizing” the service to the greatest extent possible. The powerful function of the Internet in providing information to customers facilitates this task for marketers (Thakor, Borsuk, & Kalamas, 2004). Despite the significance of intangibility in the online consumer decision-making process, the influence of website atmospherics on intangibility has rarely been studied.

Intangibility was historically defined as “what cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled” (Kotler & Bloom, 1984). Laroche, Bergeron, and Goutaland (2001) conceptualized intangibility as a construct with three dimensions: physical intangibility, generality, and mental intangibility. Physical intangibility refers to the extent to which a product is inaccessible to the senses. Generality represents the degree of difficulty in “precisely defining or describing a particular product” (Laroche, McDougall, Bergeron, & Yang, 2004, 253). Mental intangibility refers to the degree of difficulty in visualizing a particular product. The first goal of this study is to investigate the influence of website atmospherics (site informativeness, effectiveness, and entertainment) on the three dimensions of intangibility.

Furthermore, although online shopping is a global behavior, buying habits and determinants of website attractiveness are culturally bound (Jin, 2010). A firm must design a website and employ a creative strategy that will attract visitors from its various target markets. Through a study of online communications with respondents from the U. S., Egypt, China, and Germany, Seidenspinner and Theuner (2007) found that the targeted users’ cultural environments may impact their preferred navigational tools, their perceived quality of web designs, as well as their perceptions of information provided online. Firms must research their target markets and use the information acquired to create websites that resonate with these users on all levels, including culturally. It is only the websites which attract and retain traffic that will influence their volume of business transacted and, ultimately, the profitability of the firms (Tarafdar & Zhang, 2007/2008). Thus, our second goal is to test our model in three cultures (North America, the Middle East, and China) and identify the non-invariant structural paths among the groups.