One of the most important obstacles to overcome when developing a new website is creating a design that will both attract and stick consumers to the site. Whereas consumers visit hundreds of webpages, they generally only stick or stay on a site for a short time before opting out and moving on to a new site. This paper examines the causal relationship among information disclosure, the
Table 7
Comparison of rival models
Rival Model 1 Rival Model 2
Significant Ratio 60.00% 50.00%
EB→ST Not Supported EB→IS Not Supported
SD→ST Supported SD→IS Supported
IS→ST Supported EB→MF Not Supported
MF→ST Not Supported SD→MF Not Supported
ST→e-WOM Supported IS→ST Supported
MF→ST Not Supported
IS→MF Not Supported
EB→ST Supported
SD→ST Supported
ST→eWOM Supported
χ2/df 5.988 3.660
CFI 0.864 0.930
NFI 0.842 0.907
GFI 0.792 0.864
AGFI 0.724 0.814
RMSEA 0.125 0.091
RMSR 0.134 0.036
Examining the Effect of Information Disclosure on Website Stickiness: The Cognitive Information Perspective
e-WOM Website
Stickiness Information
Scent
Message Framing Sponsorship
Disclosure Endorsement
Disclosure e-WOM
Website Stickiness Information
Scent
Message Framing Sponsorship
Disclosure Endorsement
Disclosure
cognitive information effect of cues, and website stickiness. The cognitive information effect of a website includes its information scent, message framing, information retrieval, and information filtering (Sorensen et al., 1999). Amongst them, information scent and message framing utilize individuals’ short-term memory, and information retrieval and filtering utilize individuals’ long-term memory (Pirolli and Card, 1999). In some emerging industries, the life cycle of products is quite short term. Therefore, individuals’ short-term memory must be highlighted. From the academic viewpoint, while other researchers have focused on information retrieval and filtering to highlight the extraction process in consumers’ long-term memory (Moody and Galletta, 2015), this study emphasize the short-term memory of individuals, i.e. information scent and message framing, to uphold the theoretical contributions in the CIP concept. We combine the message framing and information scent concepts proposed by Rothman (2005) and Gibson et al. (2016) to form the memory mechanism based on the learning process in CIP. In sum, our findings show that sponsorship disclosure, information scent, and message framing are important factors in increasing the stickiness of customers to websites. Both sponsorship disclosure and endorsement behavior confirm the CIP concept and offer further theoretical contributions by applying information scent and message framing.
From the practical viewpoint, through empirical investigations we see that sponsorship disclosure is a critical factor to information scent, which further has a significantly positive effect on stickiness of customers. There may exist two reasons for this. First, sponsorship disclosure provides an information cue to help consumers find a linkage with a positive brand image (Kerne and Smith, 2004).
Second, the more the advertising messages align with a consumer’s self-interest, the stronger the persuasion becomes. If purchasing products is expected, then the products purchased are comparable to the consumers’ subjective expectations and perceptions. When consumers’ perception of a product is consistent with their expectation, then their expectation and interest level will be affected by the product information (Viglia et al, 2016). Sponsorship disclosure then is positively related to information scent, while information scent is positively related to stickiness. Moreover, message framing is an important intermediary variable. Sponsorship disclosure also has a positive effect on stickiness through message framing. Sponsorship gives consumers opportunities to find product
information and allows them to form stickiness. This finding is similar to that of Nebenzahl and Jaffe (1988), in which sponsorship disclosure has a significant impact on consumers’ purchases. Therefore, using sponsorship disclosure as a marketing strategy is definitively imperative (Boerman et al., 2014b; 2017) to managers.
Marketing managers can use sponsorship disclosure or celebrity endorsements for their marketing plans. The advertisements can be used during the product growth period, while the company is able to pay for endorsement and sponsorship due to sufficient profits (Moody and Galletta, 2015). Our study can be used for new product development in both emerging and traditional markets.
In fact, brand extension can be increased when celebrities and sponsors are carefully selected during product development. Managers can highlight the importance of finding sponsors who are willing to disclose complete information and ask for cues for the corporate image, reputation, and brand equity of large enterprises (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). After applying the solutions proposed by this study, businesses should gain more effective and efficient product development, providing consumers with better information transparency around products (Overton, 2018).
The empirical contribution of this study is to help businesses understand the effects on online consumer behavior, i.e. stickiness and e-WOM, by building consumers’ cognition, i.e. information scent and message framing. This finding is particularly applicable to start-ups in emerging industries such as the online game industry so as to help develop consumers’ stickiness and e-WOM. For start-ups in emerging industries, there are not enough loyal customers to create e-WOM to gradually produce long-term marketing effects. The life cycle of on-line game products is quite short term - namely, it is not easy to form e-WOM through long-term cognition (Hwang and Jeong, 2016). Therefore, based on the findings of this study, start-up companies can use endorsement disclosure and sponsorship disclosure to create e-WOM. This result is similar to that of Hwang and Jeong (2016). Emerging businesses can employ information disclosure so that consumers will be able to recognize their own needs and stimulate themselves to feel the necessary to actions.
Since we find that information scent is the most important factor in stickiness, emerging companies need to design a more convenient and
frequently-updated website interface to attract consumers on an ongoing basis, as well as to attract others to stay and become sticky consumers. This finding is similar to that of Moody and Galletta (2015). Furthermore, online consumers regard message framing as the resultant message causing their positive attitude (Overton, 2018). Through the operation of information scent and message framing effects, consumers can enjoy the atmosphere of product image and subsequently be interested in it (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010). This is the CIP process of consumers for setting up the latter behavior of stickiness and e-WOM.
Therefore, start-up companies do not need to use information retrieval and filtering on the Internet (Weisfeld-Spolter, 2014), but instead can utilize the cognitive effect, i.e. information scent and message framing, to obtain stickiness and e-WOM behavior. Emerging companies should design their website’s information cues for products so as to contribute to information transparency to their consumers (Chiu et al., 2009). The result of this study provides online emerging companies with useful evidence for constructing their relationship with consumers. Comparing the impacts of endorsements with sponsorship disclosure, we find that consumers are more interested in sponsorship disclosure. Thus, emerging companies should design their exposed information about products and website cues to create information transparency with their consumers (Rapp et al., 2013).
Finally, common method variance is a research limitation. Podsakoff and Organ (1986) indicated that common method variance (CMV) when self-reported surveys are employed as a measurement tool is one potential issue in a behavioral study. The respondents rated their perception of the predictor variable and criterion variable, and the exogenous variables and endogenous variables were collected from the same rater or source (Podsakoff et al., 2003).
We present a temporal separation in our online survey by introducing a cover picture and short story between the independent variable and dependent variable so as to create a time lag to ensure that the measurement of the independent variable is not directly connected to the dependent variable (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Our research design (temporal separation) tries to handle the issue of common method variance by decreasing the perceived relevance of previously recalled information in short-term memory. Using Harman’s one-factor analysis of unrotated principal components method, we see that there are nine factors
with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 rather than a single factor within the 54 items.
The nine factors together account for 76.10% of the total variance, and no general factors are obvious. Additionally, the interpretation variation of the first factor is 41.96%, meaning that most of the explanatory power is not explained by the first factor, showing that there is no CMV in this measurement questionnaire and that CMV issue may not be a serious problem in our study (Malhotra, Kim and Patil 2006). We do admit that there is still room for improvement in the survey process. This can be deemed as a limitation of this study and could be improved by future efforts.
This study aims to investigate stickiness through the cognitive information effect of website cues. Therefore, our questionnaire focuses on the answers from website consumers instead of those from website designers. The dyad samples can collect more effective information and can be set as the next target in the future. Moreover, length of time and frequency and depth of visit, rather than stickiness only, are the ultimate goals of the online emerging platform marketers.
Therefore, transforming stickiness into these goals can be another issue for online emerging platform marketers to evaluate and analyze. In the future, research could pay more attention to this issue in order to provide more useful strategies for managers.
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