Abstract

In the World Wide Web companies can design Web sites which appeal to both utilitarian and hedonic customers. Other than traditional media, which require a trade-off between informative and entertaining content, the Internet allows for the combination of multimedia tools in order to produce a holistic online experience. Companies therefore incorporate hedonic elements into their site in order to improve its overall effectiveness and efficiency. In this exploratory study we show the results of a longitudinal survey, in which we monitored the usage of four different communication instruments (sweepstakes, online games, wallpapers/screensavers, e-cards) on commercial websites. We differentiate between sites offering high and low involvement products and use log-linear models to visualize our results and to find the combinations of instruments which turned out to be stable over time. Our results show that companies in general have reduced the usage of hedonic instruments (e.g. e-cards) during the period of investigation and that some combinations of hedonic instruments are more frequently used than others.

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