Persuasive Design Elements for E-Tail Art Galleries: A Content Analysis

This content analysis explored the attitudes of art patrons toward gallery web sites as a test of Winn and Beck’s conceptual framework for website persuasiveness ([@R26]). Their framework was derived from Aristotle’s three rhetorical elements (logos, ethos, and pathos) as the primary concepts combined with the eleven salient factors of web site design earlier identified by [@R14] as follows: logos (price, variety, product information, effort); pathos (playfulness, tangibility, empathy); and, ethos (product quality, compatibility, assurance, reliability). The authors developed measures to test this conceptual framework on one hundred forty e-tail fine art galleries. Content analysis was selected as the most appropriate method of analysis, since the websites are document-like. Three independent raters evaluated the presence or absence of twenty-five indicators of different web attributes that measured logos, ethos, and pathos. The raters also gave overall responses to the sites’ persuasiveness from five different perspectives on conviction. The twenty-five attribute scores were summed to three index values on logos, ethos, and pathos and regressed against the conviction effects. The study confirmed the usefulness of Winn and Beck’s theory of rhetorical persuasiveness and of [@R14] salient factors for each of the three rhetorical elements in all but one regression model out of the five conviction effects. Managerial and theoretical implications for fine arts marketing and e-tailing are discussed.