The moderating role of user motivation in Internet access and individuals' responses to a Website

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a proposal for the Hierarchy of Effects - a model that has been widely applied in the study of persuasion in traditional communications media - to evaluate Website effectiveness. In particular, this contribution seeks to consider a more complete model in order to evaluate the responses of the individuals to the Websites, incorporating new variables to the traditional sequence; and to study the moderating effect of the specific characteristics of the audience - the individual user's motivations in terms of Internet access in the basic structure of this model.Design methodology approach - The multi-equations methodology is used to test the sequence of responses that produce the visit to an experimental Website: the perceived informative value and the perceived entertainment value of a Website, the attitude toward the Website, the attitude toward the brand and the intention to buy the brand for two different individual groups: the "information seekers" and "entertainment seekers".Findings - The results reveal two well differentiated positive models of behavior in the online context.Practical implications - In their Website strategies, the organizations should not neglect those aspects which may arouse emotional reactions in the Internet users, but they should pay more attention to generated informative value to obtain more favorable users' responses.Originality value - Previous studies had not tested empirically the moderating effects of the users' motivations in terms of Internet access (search for information versus entertainment) over this original and more complete structure of individuals' responses to the Website.