The authors investigate the impact of Web site design investments on consumers' trusting beliefs and online purchase intentions. Such investments signal the component of trusting beliefs that is most strongly related to online purchase intentions: ability. These effects were strongest when consumers' goals were to search rather than to browse and when purchases involved risk.
In previous research, a consumer's decision to continue a service relationship is traditionally conceptualized as a function of the integration of customers' current and past levels of utility from a given service experience. We argue that current and past service experience should be augmented by incorporating future utility considerations as well. We therefore develop a "forward-looking" model that incorporates both expected future use and anticipated regret on consumers' decisions to keep or drop a service. Strong empirical support is found for the hypothesis that expectations of high future use positively affect retention, over and above the effects of satisfaction. The results provide new insights into the antecedents of customers' perceptions of expected future usage. Customers appear to update their expectations of future use following an adaptive expectations approach. We also find support for the hypothesis that anticipated regret affects the customer decision. Consumers who are asked to anticipate regret associated with mistakenly discontinuing a service relationship are less likely to drop than those who are not asked to anticipate regret. As hypothesized, we find differential effects of anticipated regret for on-going services and transaction-based services. Taken together, the empirical findings support a forward-looking model of customer retention. The importance of incorporating these future-focused aspects into models of customer retention and marketing mix strategy is also discussed.
Research on the effects of personalized messages on consumers' behavioral responses has yielded mixed findings. We explore how e-mail personalization influences click-through intentions. Our results suggest that consumers experience personalization reactance in response to highly personalized messages when the fit between the offer in the message and consumers' personal characteristics is not explicitly justified by firms. Consequently, consumers are less willing to respond favorably to the offer. Results of two studies suggest that this effect primarily emerges for consumers who perceive the utility of the service to be relatively low. For those consumers with higher perceived utility, justification of personalization is less important because highly personalized messages are less likely to elicit reactance.
We argue that consumers with high self-brand connections (SBC) respond to negative brand information as they do to personal failure -they experience a threat to their positive self-view. After viewing negative brand information, high (vs. low) SBC consumers reported lower state selfesteem. Consumers with high SBC also maintained favorable brand evaluations despite negative brand information. However, when they completed an unrelated self-affirmation task, they lowered their brand evaluations the same as low SBC consumers. This finding suggests that high SBC consumers' reluctance to lower brand evaluation might be driven by a motivation to protect the self rather than the brand.
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