RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Lecture:  

Name Of Students : Rupali Dhanda (Student ID :200775816 )

Course Detail : MBM

Contact Details :

Bridget Hudghes : Bridge1hughes@yahoo.com

07920141112

Flat 201 d, 4 Blackfriars road, Glagow G1 1QP

Rupali Dhanda : Rupali.dhanda@gmail.com

07988898621 1-4 Parsonage row, High Street,

Glasgow G11PU Project Title :

“The Impact of Web 2.0 on Consumer Search behaviour and the affect on their purchase intensions”

  Submitted : June 2008

PURPOSE:

The dissertation is aimed at: Understanding the effect of web 2.0 on consumers when making

search decisions, what impact the comments, information and reviews available on websites are

having on consumer search behaviour and by the use of consumer theories we would attempt to

understand better the relationship between intentions to use the Internet both for information search

and purchasing. Another goal is to examine the respective roles of consumer attitude related to trust

content in predicting both Internet searching and purchasing intentions. Specifically we would be

looking at (Content) Communities category in web 2.0 using hotels.com for our case study.

REASON FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC:

Several reasons led to the proposal of this topic for our dissertation. Firstly The rise in the

popularity of web 2.0 applications for e.g.hotel.com,youtube.com, flicker etc and the spread of

internet as a platform for almost everything and anything over the past few years, and our

experiences in using these sites lead to our interest in understanding what exactly web 2.0 is and its

various applications that are available to us. How do these sites enable users to interact?

The fact that millions of people are logging on to sites like hotel.com, Face book , Flickr, YouTube

and Wikipedia, blogging etc, Consumer demand for such internet enabled services and products is

strong and the numbers are growing. Basically tickling us to understand various aspects of web 2.0

emphasizing more on the information availability on our case: hotels.com and thus to analyse

whether these sites provide reliable information to facilitate the consumer information search

process.

By this we want to know if the growth was simply leading the way (and leading the hype), or has

something more significant occurred? How the broad populace of "connected consumers" discover

things? how do they trust the information on these ? What drives consumers’ desire to purchase (or

not) online?

Finally, An important aspect of consumer behaviour in electronic environments is the search habits

consumers adopt when gathering information before making a purchase decision. We argue that

information search may be the single most important functional element leading to purchase via the

Internet.(reference to back it up) If search intentions play a central role in predicting future

purchasing intention, search attitudes could be a valuable research tool for predicting the

probability of consumer purchasing on the Web. Such a finding would also suggest that any

decision not to buy while shopping on the Web is largely the consequence of variety of factors one

being the trust content how much effect does this have on the two aspects. Very little research has

been conducted within this area and therefore we thought that there is a need to explore the link

between consumer search behaviour and content trust and how all of this affects the purchase

intensions.

Research Questions

1. Do open web sources such as social networking sites, reputation sites: web1.0(blogs), web 2.0

(sites like hotels.com)provide reliable information to facilitate the consumer Information search

process?

2. How much trust (content trust) do users place in open web sources? Are there certain factors that

drive/influence/effect content trust'?

3. Can content trust be measured? If any, how can the above mentioned 'determining factors of

content trust' be combined into an overall 'content trust value'

4. How and to what extent does the trust at information search phase affect the consumer purchase

decision of a product or a service online e.g at amazon.com.

Learning Objectives

The objective of the study is to investigate how much effect information on Hotels.com have on

consumers search behaviour which is a prerequisite of consumers decision making process and to

analyse the importance of content trust of consumers and its effect on the purchase intentions. The

findings could be useful to marketers in understanding the power of web 2.0 as a direct marketing

tool.

1. In Uk market ,what is the penetration rate of web 2.0 and what age group uses such

application and to what extent do they trust?

2. What is the extent of spread of using web 2.0 in our targeted customer age group (15 – 35)

3. Once consumers are aware of the reliability and trust of these open sources, will they

continue to make use of them? If yes, how much will it affect the growth of such sources?

4. Does the trust of these sources depend on the type of product or service?

5. What determines the popularity of these sites? Is this popularity the reason why consumers

should use such sources and if they should trust it?

6. Compare to traditional outlets such as t.v, books, magazines etc, how important do

consumers hold information on line?

7. we want to learn whether consumers actually believe that the user generated content can be

a reliable source of information in deciding what product or service to purchase

8. If this new technology called web 2.0 actually aids consumers search process has an effect

on consumer’s intentions to purchase.

Theories and Concepts to be used.

Theories of consumer behaviour

Theories of information search behaviour

Theories of purchase intentions

Classification of Web 2.0

Principles of web 2.0

(we are working on it, still more to be read about and mentioned)

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:

Target customers: Web based consumers those who might get influenced by the information

available on the website: hotels.com and would have an impact on their purchase intentions. We

intend to analyze and target them by both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Quantitative method would involve survey and questionnaires sample size of 100, which would

help us narrow down our target consumers and then we intend to use qualitative method of

interviewing our sample chosen of the total surveyed. We intend to get an in debt information on

their behaviour and factors that cause the purchase intentions.

We intend to use secondary data like articles online and available journals, books, information

available on hotels.com and other related blog sites.

Literature review

Journals :

Journal of advertising research December 2007 volume 47,no.4

Editorial:

398 Word of mouth research:principles and application

387 Reconsidering model of influencingLthe relationship between consumer social networks and

wom effectiveness

436 Word of mouth impact on the web: the impact of web 2.0 on consumer purchase decisions

472 Bloggers motivation and behaviours:a model

485 The influence of eWOM on virtual consumer communities

Title:Participative web and user-created content : web 2.0, wikis and social networking /

[Graham Vickery, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent].

Publication Details:[Paris] : Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,

2007.Description:124 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Available at

http://puck.sourceoecd.org/vl=25049586/cl=20/nw=1/rpsv/ij/oecdthemes/99980134/

v2007n15/s1/p1l

Author:Scoble, Robert,

Title:Naked conversations : how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers /

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

Publication Details:Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley, c2006.

Description:x, 251 p. ; 24 cm.

Science & Information Technology

2007, vol. 2007, no. 15, pp. 1 - 128

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

REPORT by Morghan and stanely

Available at:

http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/web2.0.pdf

Deutch, M. (1960). The effect of motivational orientation upon trust and suspicion. Human

Relations, 13, 122-139.

Suleiman, R. and Rapoport, A. (1992). Provision of step level public goods with continuous

contribution. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 5. 133-153.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Journal of advertising research December 2007 volume 47,no.4

Editorial:

398 Word of mouth research:principles and application

387 Reconsidering model of influencingLthe relationship between consumer social networks

and wom effectiveness

436 Word of mouth impact on the web: the impact of web 2.0 on consumer purchase decisions

472 Bloggers motivation and behaviours:a model

485 The influence of eWOM on virtual consumer communities

Title:Participative web and user-created content : web 2.0, wikis and social networking /

[Graham Vickery, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent].

Publication Details:[Paris] : Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,

2007.Description:124 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Available at

http://puck.sourceoecd.org/vl=25049586/cl=20/nw=1/rpsv/ij/oecdthemes/99980134/v2007n15/

s1/p1l

Author:Scoble, Robert,

Title:Naked conversations : how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers /

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

Publication Details:Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley, c2006.

Description:x, 251 p. ; 24 cm.

Science & Information Technology

2007, vol. 2007, no. 15, pp. 1 - 128

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

REPORT by Morghan and stanely

Available at:

http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/web2.0.pdf

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_mainstream_everything.php#more

http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/reports/DigConsStudy.pdf

http://www.vinnylingham.com/search-behaviour-research-update-ses-london-2006-

session.html

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?

contentType=Article&contentId=863754

http://www.tengoldenrules.com/web20.htm

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles6/web2-mashups-social-network.htm

http://epubl.ltu.se/1404-5508/2003/154/LTU-SHU-EX-03154-SE.pdf

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/dddmp/journal/v9/n3/full/

4350098a.html;jsessionid=03E91743137AC57E4F19324C546BA989

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4276338/4276339/04276536.pdf?

tp=&isnumber=4276339&arnumber=4276536

http://analogik.com/article_analysis_of_consumer_behaviour_online.asp

http://informationr.net/ir/12-4/paper324.html

http://jbao.atu.edu/Spring2006/

HadjiphanisChristouRoleECommerceLoizosJBAOSpring2006.pdf

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g527315w5x514564/

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10254064_ITM

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5495/is_200501/ai_n21364104

http://ikt.hia.no/perep/searchmode.pdf

http://emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=/published/

emeraldfulltextarticle/pdf/0291070102_ref.html

http://jib.debii.curtin.edu.au/iss03_mafe.pdf

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis/journal/v12/n1/full/3000445a.html

Understanding online purchase intentions: contributions from technology and trust

perspectives

http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2008/3075/00/30750138.pdf

Relationship between Uncertainty and Patterns of Pre-purchase Consumer Search in

Electronic Markets