Quality, value, satisfaction, trust, a

MODELING THE IMPACT OF INTERNET ATMOSPHERICS ON SURFER BEHAVIOR
1. Introduction
The Internet is growing in importance since the concept of a product is becoming more
information-based (Brännback, 1997) and offers the opportunity to separate information about a
product (or service) from the product itself (Rayport and Sviokla, 1994).
A 1997 study of URLs in mass media ads showed that nearly one-fourth of the non-users of
the Internet were planning to log on within the next month, and their principal destination was a
health site (Maddox et al., 1997; Maddox, 1999). For current users of the Internet, health-related
sites ranked second as a destination within the next month, with 51% planning to visit one site
(Maddox et al., 1997). Of those who seek medical data online, 52% are looking for information
on diseases and 33% on pharmaceuticals (Miller and Reents, 1998). As Internet usage continues
to grow across the world, the focus for many companies is slowly shifting from merely creating
to more strategic aspects involving how to best use this medium. One of the most important
objectives of firms on the Web remains effective communications with consumers. This
emphasizes the importance of developing and testing systematic models of the Web as an
advertising or communication tool.
Most research on online communication of information is in the context of online retailing. This
study seeks to expand the scope of models of consumer behavior and responses to Web site and interface
characteristics. More explicitely, it proposes and empirically tests a general model of consumer behavior
and responses to Web site environmental cues based on theoretical frameworks for Web atmospherics in a
retail setting developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974); Donovan and Rossiter (1982) and, more
recently, Dailey (2002) and Eroglu, Machleit and Davis (2001).
Our study differs from and extends the literature in several ways: first, unlike most previous research,
we propose and test our model in the general context of information-seeking in online retailing
specifically. Second, in the spirit of Eroglu et al. (2001) we provide a broader, more comprehensive
model integrating research on Web site environmental cues (to stimulate the search for information),
internal states conceptualized by cognitive and affective aspects of the surfers’ behavior, and finally
outcomes. Third, our study goes beyond theoretical model development; our empirical testing is
performed in the context of a real-world pharmaceutical Web site. Finally, we apply a significantly more
sophisticated methodology that allows us to test the structure and validity of our proposed model.
We begin by briefly discussing previous literature relevant to the antecedents, processing and
consequences of interest to our model. This is followed by the presentation of our proposed
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