Determining Uses and Gratifications for the Internet

Decision Sciences, Spring 2004 by Stafford, Thomas F, Stafford, Marla Royne, Schkade, Lawrence L

ABSTRACT

Uses and gratifications (U&G) is a media use paradigm from mass communications research that guides the assessment of consumer motivations for media usage and access. It has been used previously in research and decision making related to the promotion of emerging radio and television media. Recent adaptations of U&G research to the Internet are incomplete and have not identified important new Internet-specific gratifications. This paper empirically derives dimensions of consumer Internet use and usage gratifications among customers of a prominent Internet Service Provider (ISP). Results describe three key dimensions related to consumer use of the Internet, including process and content gratifications as previously found in studies of television, as well as an entirely new social gratification that is unique to Internet use. All three dimensions of gratification are relevant to managing the Internet as a commercial medium, and measures developed from the gratification profiles identified here can serve as trait-valid scales in future Internet and e-commerce research.

Subject Areas: Functional Areas: Choice Processes, Consumer Behavior, End-User Computing, Human/Computer Interaction, Internet, Motivation, and Uses and Gratifications; Methodological Areas: Confirmatory Analysis, Multivariate Statistics, and Survey Research.

INTRODUCTION

The Internet is revolutionary; it represents a paradigm shift in the way we do business (Chang, Jackson, & Grover, 2003; Palmer & Griffith, 1998), and it is routinely being integrated into modern business practice (Grover & Pradipkumar, 1999). It was always expected that the Internet would have huge potential not only for communication but also for marketing (Dreze & Zufryden, 1997). Internet-based electronic commerce was considered to still be in the formative stages just a few years ago at the advent of the millennium (Bakos, 1998; Gallaugher, 1999); it is still considered a work in progress in light of the business failures seen in recent years, with much room left for improvement both in terms of corporate strategy and a consumer-focused market orientation in the present day (e.g., Chang et al., 2003).

Consumer e-commerce can take place over a variety of channels aside from the Internet, such as direct response television and telephone, and through private networks as in the case of electronic funds transfers (Turban, Lee, King, & Chung, 2000); but except for these channels, without consumer Internet use there would be no consumer e-commerce because the Internet is the vehicle through which the majority of business-to-consumer e-commerce transpires (see Eighmey, 1997; Eighmey & McCord, 1998; Novak, Hoffman, & Yung, 2000). This is why scholars and managers alike are compelled to investigate why consumers choose to use the Internet: it is analogous to the reasons why marketers study store patronage behavior in retailing, and it is essential to guiding the success of the enterprise.

Our focus here is on consumer motivations to use the Internet, an important issue by itself, certainly, but an issue that is also related to the engines of commerce, on the rationale that Internet use is a link in the consumer e-commerce process that mediates its impact. We use the theoretical perspective of media uses and gratifications perspective for understanding Internet use, specifically among a large sample of customers from America Online (AOL), the leading Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the United States. Our approach examines the motivations that lead customer ISP subscribers to spend time online and make use of Internet resources; our investigation is limited to understanding reasons for use of the Internet via AOL. This is not the same as investigating business-to-consumer e-commerce specifically; rather, it is a case of investigating a critical facilitator of consumer e-commerce among a highly typical cross-section of the Internet-using public.

Users of AOL can be a reasonably representative sample of consumer Internet use. Although sophisticated broadband services are reaching the market, they are generally available only in urban centers, and have not fully lived up to their promotional assurances for performance; for that reason, ISP-based Internet access remains a general norm in the consumer market (e.g., McElligott, 2000). Internal research at AOL (provided in the Appendix) demonstrates strong similarities between the general Internet, AOL, the AOL research site Opinion Place, and the general U.S. population. A recent Roper-Starch poll (Media Awareness Network, 2003) surveyed 1,000 Internet users about their perceptions of the Internet's necessity in everyday life; aside from discovering that 71% of respondents routinely research their product purchases online, findings also revealed that half of the sample was comprised of regular AOL users. Moreover, results of a recent study on buyer assurance in e-commerce (Arnold, Landry, & Reynolds, 2003) show that the AOL-Certified Merchant classification is the most prevalent buyer assurance mark among the 100 highest-volume web sites in the United States, ahead of Verisign, Trust-e, and BBBOnline.