Consumers' perceptiion of the internet as a product information tool - An Exploratory Study on Online Searching Behaviour and Source Evaluation

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 60%, Bournemouth University, 108 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Over the last ten years, the Internet has received growing importance all over the world. With the increasing user numbers, also companies have developed an interest in presenting themselves online and using the new medium as a tool for Marketing and PR. However, the open structure of the Internet has also enabled customers to publish their opinions on companies and product. Without being dependent on traditional media, these third-party texts are now available easily to the public. Online formats, which allow individuals to express their opinions either alone or within a group form now a considerable amount of the product- or company-related information available. This has led to the fear of companies of losing reputation and customers because of this uncontrolled information. However, very little investigation has gone into the usage of these sources by consumers when searching for product information online and therefore tried to justify this fear.This lack of research is addressed by the present study. It explores search strategies of consumers and their decisions for certain online sources. Especially the decision for either corporate or non-corporate sources has been in the focus. The research builds on variables, which have been considered by other researcher as influential for internet behaviour. The conceptual framework outlines this background and discusses research, which has been conducted in related areas.In the centre of attention is the European perspective. However, because of time and financial constraints primary research has been limited to two countries.Six focus group interviews have been conducted in Germany and Italy, followed by 40 qualitative e-mail interviews in both countries. The findings of the research led to the conclusion that the internet is not used in such an active way as it could and as many researchers suggested. Consumers mostly feel limited by time or interest. Especially the high amount of information available online has been found deterrent. Furthermore, it turned out that users are sceptical towards individual information and therefore prefer official sources or sources where a high number of opinions are provided. However, it has been concluded that the corporate web site is no longer the only source for consumers and that companies are forced to an honest communication strategy since people are aware of other information sources.