Customer Testimonials and News Clips as Contextual Cues in the Consumer Cognitive Processing of Online Shopping

Abstract Do people process information differently when it is presented in the form of news clips versus customer testimonials? This study investigated how consumers make purchase decisions online by integrating and examining two streams of content class, customer testimonials and news clips. The laboratory experiment tested several hypotheses on the determinants of a consumer's purchase intention. The findings suggested that consumers evaluated a web store by focusing on trust and believability of the content class to draw conclusion of their attitude toward shopping at the web store. Then the attitude influenced their purchase intentions. With the ongoing trend of integrated marketing communications (IMC) in advertising and public relations education, the result is encouraging as if both customer testimonials and news clips increase a consumer's purchase intention when either one of these content classes are present to serve as a contextual cue. However, one content class, news clip, is clearly a better determinant of building trust and increasing a consumer's purchase intention. When both are present, customer testimonials seem to decrease a news clip's influence on both trust and the purchase intention. In other words, improving the usage of various content classes in a website might be effective in helping advertisers improve their marketing strategies. Implications for advertisers and the direction of future research are also presented.