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A Study On The Attachment Between Consumers And Shopping Websites

Posted on:2014-02-24Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y JiangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1229330395498689Subject:Business management
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
As the online competition, building high quality relationships between retailers and their costomers are more important in the electronic commerce environment, but it can’t make retailers obtain the long-term success by only providing customers with the satisfaction of experience. Research has shown that retailers have failed to bulld long-lasting customer loyalty because they are unable to creat strong emotional bonds with their customers. It is an important task for online retailers that creating emotional bonds between customers and shopping websites. Attachment theory that originated in the psychology provides a new perspective to explore the emotional relationships between customers and retailers. Attachment theory is regarded as an excellent theoretical framework to explain intimate relationships and has a significant advantage to uncover individual differences, the intensity and quality of interpersonal relationships. Research in psychology suggests that personal attachment styles are stable across different relationship situations. However, no research has directly examined the emotional attachment between consumers and shopping website(refers to as website attachment) in B2C environment.This dissertation applies attachment theory to B2C Internet shopping context firstly and carries out the research work from three aspects as follows:(1)Based on literature review and depth interviews, the dissertation defines the concept of website attachment including website identity, website affection and website dependence, corresponds to three components such as cognition, emotion and intention and constitutes a kind of attitude structure. On this basis, the dissertation develops a relaible and valid multi-dimensional scale.(2) Based on relevant theories, the dissertation integrates the website attachment dimensions (Organism) into Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model, builds a causal model including the antecedent variables (Stimulus) such as convenience, enjoyment, sense of community and website customer orientation and the outcome variable (Response) i.e. relationship quality. Research results suggest that the three dimensions of website attachment are the drivers of relationship quality between customers and shopping websites and the website affection is the most important factor. Among them, convenience and customer orientation have significant effects on the three dimensions of website attachment, enjoyment influences website identity and website affection directly, sense of community plays an important role in promoting the website identity and website dependence. Research also clearly suggests that the three dimensions of website attachment are full mediators in the conceptual model of this study.(3) The dissertation investigate the effect of website attachment and relationship quality is moderated by consumers’ personality trait i.e. relationship anxiety. The results show that as consumers’ level of relationship anxiety increasing, it will be enhanced that website attachment has effect on relationship quality. The moderating effects of consumers’ levels of relationship anxiety among strength of relationship paths from large to small are as follows: website identity and relationship quality, website affection and relationship quality, website dependence and relationship quality.The contributions of this dissertation as follows:(1)The dissertation defines the three dimensional attitude structure of website attachment firstly in B2C online shopping environment, develops a relaible and valid multi-dimensional scale of website attachment, expands the application boundary of attachment theory.(2) The dissertation builds a causal model of website attachment, investigates the antecedents and consequences of emotional attachment synchronously, clarifies the nomological network of website attachment.(3) The dissertation examines the moderating effects of consumers’ levels of relationship anxiety between website attachment and relationship quality firstly in the online shopping context, reflects completely the formation mechanism of website attachment. The dissertation provides great reference values for online retailers striving to build rich emotional bonds with their consumers and improving the relationship marketing performance.
Keywords/Search Tags:Internet Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Website Attachment, S-O-R Model, Relationship Quality
PDF Full Text Request
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