Creating effective online customer experiences through well-designed product web pages is critical to success in online retailing. How such web pages should look specifically, however, remains unclear. Previous work has only addressed a few online design elements in isolation, without accounting for the potential need to adjust experiences to reflect the characteristics of the products or brands being sold. Across 16 experiments, this research investigates how 13 unique design elements shape four dimensions of the online customer experience (informativeness, entertainment, social presence, and sensory appeal) and thus influence purchase. Product (search vs. experience) and brand (trustworthiness) characteristics exacerbate or mitigate the uncertainty inherent in online shopping, such that they moderate the influence of each experience dimension on purchases. A field experiment that manipulates real product pages on Amazon.com affirms these findings. The results thus provide managers with clear strategic guidance on how to build effective web pages.

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Firms track consumers’ shopping behaviors in their online stores to provide individually personalized banners through a method called retargeting. We use data from two large-scale field experiments and two lab experiments to show that, although personalization can substantially enhance banner effectiveness, its impact hinges on its interplay with timing and placement factors. First, personalization increases click-through especially at an early information state of the purchase decision process. Here, banners with a high degree of content personalization (DCP) are most effective when a consumer has just visited the advertiser’s online store, but quickly lose effectiveness as time passes since that last visit. We call this phenomenon overpersonalization. Medium DCP banners, on the other hand, are initially less effective, but more persistent, so that they outperform high DCP banners over time. Second, personalization increases click-through irrespective of whether banners appear on motive congruent or incongruent display websites. In terms of view-through, however, personalization increases ad effectiveness only on motive congruent websites, but decreases it on incongruent websites. We demonstrate in the lab how perceptions of ad informativeness and intrusiveness drive these results depending on consumers’ experiential or goal-directed Web browsing modes.

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Brand leaders possess tremendous agency, with the ability to shape a sweeping variety of outcomes. Does this fact confer psychological value to consumers? We posit that external conditions that undermine feelings of personal control cause consumers to affiliate more with brand leaders. This occurs because affiliating with such high-agency brands gives consumers a sense of personal agency and thereby restores feelings of control. An initial study using archival data from nearly 18,000 consumers reporting on over 1,200 brands documents real-world effects that are consistent with these propositions. Four follow-up experiments demonstrate the effect of low control on brand leader (vs. nonleader) purchase intentions using direct manipulations in controlled settings, capture the underlying process, and rule out alternative explanations. This research thus reveals that the psychology of personal control underlies a process that benefits brand leaders.