Internet and related technologies have dramatically changed the landscape of global branding. In the last 15 years, online brands have grown from obscurity to become household names with market values that place them in the top 100 world's most valuable brands. In fact, one such name (Google) now tops global ratings with an estimated worth of $100,039 million (Financial Times, 2009). Traffic, that is the repeated interactions between an online brand and its users, is the key asset underlying this success (Song, Zhang, Xu, & Huang, 2010). Maintaining an active engagement with the user through repeated interactions remains a critical issue for the online brand (Bart et al., 2005, Bridges and Florsheim, 2008, Christodoulides, 2009, Helm, 2007 and Kollmann and Suckow, 2008).
Understanding and creating conditions that result in a positive online brand experience remains high-priority within two different fields of academic enquiry. The information systems (IS) tradition, in particular studies based on technology acceptance model (Davis, 1989), conceptualizes online brands as pieces of technology. Taking the system usability view, this research tends to focus on task-related features of the brand and considers user experiences in terms of functional outcomes, such as usefulness or functionality (Kim, 2005, Koufaris, 2002 and Pavlou et al., 2007). By contrast the marketing literature tends to view online brands as augmented products or services that meet certain customer needs through interaction in computer-mediated environments (Hoffman and Novak, 1996 and Hoffman and Novak, 2009). Marketing scholars emphasize the emotive aspects of brand experience and subjective evaluations of the brand, stressing the importance of brand personality (Okazaki, 2006), image (Da Silva and Syed Alwi, 2008a, Da Silva and Syed Alwi, 2008b and Kwon and Lennon, 2009) or brand equity (Christodoulides et al., 2006 and Christodoulides and de Chernatony, 2004).
The online brand experience encompasses both the cognitive and the affective states (Bhat and Reddy, 1998 and Mollen and Wilson, 2010) and a few authors acknowledge the importance of both perspectives (Bridges and Florsheim, 2008, Caruana and Ewing, 2010 and Hausman and Siekpe, 2009). For example, some IS scholars focus on hedonic brand experiences and constructs such as fun (Lin, Gregor, & Ewing, 2008). Despite these efforts, in a recent review Taylor and Strutton (2010) conclude that adherence to disciplinary boundaries leads to an incomplete understanding of the antecedents and outcomes of e-marketing and that a unifying framework encompassing interdisciplinary concepts is urgently needed. Responding to the call for a more integrated approach, this study aims to combine theoretical insights from marketing and IS research to arrive at a model of the online brand experience. The model extends the notion of experiencing the brand beyond usability (Flavian, Guinaliu, & Gurrea, 2006), loyalty (Caruana & Ewing, 2010) or satisfaction (Koufaris, 2002), to include the emotive responses and connections with the brand, namely brand relationships. While practitioners recognize these aspect of online brand experience as being critical to the success (Rappaport, 2007), academic research largely overlooks them (Mollen and Wilson, 2010). The investigation focuses on search engines. Compared with online retail brands and online purchasing (Caruana and Ewing, 2010, Eastlick et al., 2006, Ha and Stoel, 2009 and Kim and Jihyun, 2009), the internet search engines represent an under-researched phenomenon. Yet, the search engines provide a particularly poignant context for analyzing brand relationships. The absence of direct sales means that online brand experiences are both narrower and more immediate (Petre, Minocha, & Roberts, 2006) increasing the emphasis on the quality of the experience and the importance of building long-term relationships with the users (Helm, 2007).
The current research responds to calls for a more integrative view of user interaction with an online brand. The results show than online brand experiences depend on the perceptions of the usefulness of the brand, trust and indirectly, on its reputation. Positive experiences lead to satisfaction, behavioral intentions and in turn, to emotional ties with the brand.
The results draw attention to the importance of emotive brand experiences in the context of search engines. Online environments are, by their nature, information-based service environments that are fundamentally linked with technology and technological innovation. In this crowded and ever changing market-space, branding emerges as a key weapon in fight for consumer attention.
This study is not without limitations. The cross-sectional design captures data at a point in time and does not fully address the causal relationships among the study constructs. The approach only partially explores of the dynamics of the interrelationships and the richness and multidimensionality of the constructs. Future research should employ longitudinal designs to address the dynamics, complexity and causality effects. The use of a non-randomized sampling design represents another limitation. The large sample size and the demographic representativeness of the sample provide some assurance of validity but the responses are limited to a narrow geographical area. Future studies could use the internet to collect data from larger populations. Although such a design does not provide a probability sample, the large sample size would further increase confidence in the generalizability of findings. The measurement model represents a key area of concern. Although all measures are based on existing studies, the reduction of the scale response format to 5 points adversely affected variability and validity of the scales (Churchill & Peter, 1984). Future research should revalidate the measurement scales developed and used in this study. Finally, although the results support the importance of branding in online environments, the study incorporates only a small subset of branding constructs. For example, the study did not explore the role of brand personality in shaping consumer experiences. Future studies should consider other aspects of branding, specifically brand personality, alongside the study constructs.
