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Abstract
Although various kinds of personalization cues are pervasively used on websites, previous research studies have treated web personalization primarily as a coarse-grained, monolithic block (e.g., by comparing personalization vs. nonpersonalization or personalization vs. privacy) rather than as a combination of salient types of personalization cues that may create—either jointly or separately—different effects on user assessments of website value. Based on the stimulus–organism–response framework, we develop a research model that proposes users’ preference fit and perceived enjoyment as two key intervening mechanisms that carry over the differential effects of content and design personalization cues on users’ willingness to stick to a website and to pay for website offerings. In a field experiment with 206 subjects using a real-life news aggregator website, our findings provide evidence in support of different effect paths emanating from content and design personalization cues. Furthermore, we show that the effects of content personalization cues on website stickiness and users’ willingness to pay (WTP) are mediated by both preference fit and perceived enjoyment, whereas design personalization cues exert their effects on website stickiness only through perceived enjoyment. Counter to intuition, we find that a combination of content and design personalization cues is ineffective—or even counterproductive—in increasing preference fit and users’ WTP above and beyond the levels generated by content cues alone. With regard to perceived enjoyment and website stickiness, however, content and design personalization cues exhibit synergistic properties indicating that the combination of both cues are more than the sum of the individual cues alone. Recommendations are provided as to how online managers and web designers can use web personalization cues to positively influence website stickiness and to strengthen their digital business model.
Notes
1. Whereas we have suggested in H1a and H1b that content and design personalization cues—both jointly and separately—positively affect preference fit and enjoyment (compared to a situation in which no cues are provided), we assume a comparative perspective in which we compare the magnitude of content and design personalization cues’ independent effects on preference fit and enjoyment.
2. Although we expect that a combination of content and design personalization cues will be superior to design personalization cues alone in affecting preference fit (because of the higher marginal contributions by content than design personalization cues to strengthening preference fit), we focus our hypothesis development on the theoretically more interesting case and thus leave this comparison to a supplementary analysis.
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Notes on contributors
Alexander Benlian
Alexander Benlian is a chaired professor of information systems, especially electronic services, at Darmstadt University of Technology (TU Darmstadt), Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in business administration and management information systems from the University of Munich. His research interests include web personalization in e-commerce, digital business models, software platforms, and software-as-a-service. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, Journal of Service Research, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Decision Support Systems, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, and others, as well as in the proceedings of conferences such as the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS).