Effects Of Functional Factors And Symbolic Factors On Web Brands

The development of the Internet has great influence on companies, consumers and even the whole society, especially for companies, for the Internet offers another channel for them to communicate with their consumers. Now more and more companies have realized the value of web brands and have set up websites to present their web brands. Although e-companies have invested a large amount of money to build websites, very little is known about how to deliver the brand image through the website designing. Up to now, the extant research on the Internet is more focused on the difference between the Internet and conventional media than on how to utilize the potential of the new medium. In this paper, I aim at finding out those functional and symbolic web-designing factors that are of significance to web brands, the influence of these web-designing factors on telepresence and the influence of telepresence on consumers' attitude towards the web brand.Given that direct product experience is usually the optimal method for consumers to learn about product information (Berger and Mitchell 1989; Marks and Kamins 1988; Smith and Swinyard 1988; Wu and Shaffer 1987), one of a marketer's goals should be to strive for verisimilitude in any indirect communications. In this paper, I employ the construct of telepresence (Steuer, 1992), which is defined as a sense of presence in a mediated environment. According to Steuer, there were two critical media features that exerted great influence on the creation of telepresence:(l) media interactivity, and (2) media vividness. In this paper, website interactivity is determined by three website design factors (1) the speed at which the website responses to consumers operation (Steuer, 1992), (2) the range of consumer control the website offers (Steuer, 1992), and (3) mapping which refers to the extent to which the operation on a website mirrors the activities in reality (Steuer, 1992). And website vividness is determined by two website design factors: (1) multimedia presentation and (2) information quality (Kleinmuntz and Schkade, 1993). And in this paper, I define attitude in terms of cognition, affection and conation. Based on previous research, I make the hypothesis that telepresence positively influence the consumer attitude in all the three dimensionsThe results of the study confirm that both consumer control and information quality contribute to the creation of telepresence and telepresence does positively influence the consumer attitude towards the web brand.