مدل رفتار مصرف کننده وب سایت ناوبری : توسعه و کاربرد مفهومی

Despite recent success by companies using the Internet to deal with their customers, one of the major remaining problems concerns understanding navigation on the Web and its relationship with Internet marketing. This study looks at the factors that can affect customers' prepurchase intentions by surveying visitors to a real pharmaceutical web site, and it models the behavior of consumers when they are confronted with the navigational characteristics of an Internet site. The model of flow designed by Hoffman and Novak and previous findings and theories about several relevant behavioral variables are taken into account to propose and empirically test a model of consumers' web navigational behavior. We use structural equations modeling to test 10 major hypotheses and more than two third of the 28 subhypotheses are supported. The findings contribute to theoretical and managerial understanding of the web navigation behavior of visitors.

As Internet usage increases worldwide, the focus is shifting from establishing a presence to strategic aspects. One important objective of firms on the web remains effective communications with consumers. The attention given to online retailing notwithstanding, most firms on the Internet use web sites as a communication tool, rather than for transactions. This emphasizes the importance of developing and testing systematic models of the web as a communication tool. Most research on online communication is in the context of online retailing. This study seeks to expand the scope of models of consumer responses to web site and interface characteristics. Where previous models have primarily focused on developing theoretical frameworks for web atmospherics in a retail setting, this study tests a more general model of consumer responses to web site characteristics based on the theory of flow (Hoffman and Novak, 1996 and Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), which remains a cornerstone in our understanding of web site–human interactions. Several studies (Smith and Sivakumar, 2004 and Novak et al., 2000) have applied this theory to develop models of consumer responses to site characteristics. Our paper extends the literature in several ways: first, unlike most previous research, our model is in the general context of online communications, rather than online retailing. Second, in the spirit of Eroglu et al. (2001), we provide a broader, more comprehensive model integrating research on web site navigational characteristics, user characteristics, internal states, consumer responses, approach/avoidance behavior, and outcomes. Third, our empirical testing is performed in the context of a real-world pharmaceutical web site. The next section reviews the literature and develops all the hypotheses. Our model draws from a broad range of literature, to which it would be impossible to do justice. Therefore, it is necessarily a brief review highlighting the most relevant literature. The following section describes the empirical approach and the data used. We conclude with discussions of the findings and implications.

The results show that challenge strongly affects the surfers' exploratory behavior, as well as interactivity, site involvement, and prepurchase intentions. Skills have a direct link to both OSL and exploratory behavior. Both challenge and skills have an indirect link with attitudes towards the site through exploratory behavior. Thus, the greater the skills, the higher the OSL, and the more likely the customer is to increase exploratory behavior, particularly information seeking, leading to more positive attitudes toward the site. Interactivity has a weak but positive impact on attitudes toward the web site. This is consistent with previous research by Luna et al. (2002), who demonstrated that the effect of interactivity on the revisit intentions variable is only partially mediated by surfers' attitude and navigation experience. We hypothesized that interactivity would increase site involvement, but this path was not significant. With a significant correlation between attitudes toward the site and site involvement, interactivity was expected to lead to approach behavior toward the site and site involvement (Ha and James, 1998), which was not borne out by our results. One possible explanation might be the high correlation between site involvement and attitudes toward the site. Another more likely explanation relates to the measure itself. Liu (2003) found that interactivity is composed of three dimensions: active control, synchronicity, and two-way communication. Our measure seems to tap only the first two dimensions and is only a measure of interactivity control/synchronicity, and the missing link may be related to the two-way communication dimension, which was not measured. One interesting and useful finding relates to the support for the impact of navigational characteristics effectiveness. We find that navigational characteristics are positively related to surfers' optimal stimulation level and to site involvement. We can infer that when navigational characteristics are positive, surfers develop some arousal early in their online browsing, which can positively affect their site involvement. Another contribution is the incorporation in the model of the NFC construct. We find a positive relationship between NFC and interactivity and a negative one with OSL. People with high NFC are intrinsically motivated, tend to exhibit curiosity, intrinsically enjoy thinking and doing complex tasks, are less likely to decrease their efforts on cognitive tasks, and have a lower OSL (that is, they are more comfortable with familiar stimuli). Furthermore, high NFC induces increased interactivity as surfers can participate in changing the form and the content of a mediated environment in real time. The results also showed that NFC has a positive impact on exploratory behavior and a negative one on attitude toward the site. The exploratory behavior construct includes curiosity-motivated search for product information. Moreover, browsing increases when surfers do not have precise knowledge of the information available and are not sure if their requirements can be met or how they may be reached, and because of that, high NFC people have a lower attitude toward the site than low NFC people. The results indicate that OSL has an indirect link with attitudes toward the web site, mediated by exploratory behavior. According to Raju (1980), OSL determines the degree of exploratory behavior of surfers, as they are going to be more inclined to browse. As expected, reasons to visit the web site are positively related to site involvement and to prepurchase intentions. One surprising result was the failure to support prior research linking attitudes toward the web site and prepurchase intentions. First, this might be due to high correlation between involvement and attitude. Second, these two constructs are not directly associated with the same object. Although prepurchase intentions are related to the web site, the items concern more specifically the drug (or brand of that company). From the point of view of online retailing, this result takes on added significance, as it appears to go against some previous findings. We propose that attitude toward the site is the main outcome for general browsers, while prepurchase intentions is the main outcome for purposive browsers or information seekers (i.e., influenced by site involvement and reasons to visit a web site, but not by site attitudes). One of the strongest findings relates to the support for the impact of site involvement. We find that involvement has a positive impact on prepurchase intentions, and exploratory behavior, but of more interest is the finding that site involvement is positively related to attitude toward the site (directly and indirectly through exploratory behavior). Highly involved consumers are more attracted by web site aspects related to the product (information content), whereas low-involved ones focus more on the peripheral stimuli of the site (visuals, sounds, and frames) or the site's design characteristics. Highly involved surfers develop positive attitudes toward the site, leading to behaviors, such as repeat visits to collect up-to-date information. Obviously, this finding carries significant theoretical and managerial implications.