O'Cass, Aron, and Jamie Carlson. "Examining the effects of website-induced flow in professional sporting team websites." Internet Research 20.2 (2010): 115-134. Web. 27 Sep 2010.
An article about flow experience using sports team websites may not seem like a logical choice for my project, but I think it is. Authors, fiction genres, and specific book series generate interest and fandom in much the same way that sports figures and teams do.
The concept of flow is an attempt at explaining what happens to individuals when they are completely immersed in a task. During flow tasks seem effortless and the sense that time is passing loses meaning. For marketing the implication is that creating online experiences that lead to flow will encourage site users to linger longer and return more frequently. O’Cass and Carlson tried, in this study, to investigate the relationship between flow and affective components such as aroused feelings and satisfaction. They also investigated behavioral outcomes such as website revisits, purchases, and word-of-mouth referrals.
The researchers posed several hypotheses. They were:
· Flow will have a significant positive influence on satisfaction with the sporting organization’s website.
· Flow will have a significant positive influence on the arousal of positive feelings from the sporting organization’s website.
· Flow will have a significant positive influence on the development of loyalty for the sporting organization’s website.
· Flow will have a significant positive influence on the development of positive word-of-mouth about the sporting organization’s website.
The methodology used by O’Cass and Carlson was complex and exhaustively tested. They developed a set of 30 questions based on seven previous studies. These items and their scales were then reviewed by a panel of “senior academic experts” and pre-tested by a small sampling of potential participants. A final set of 21 questions was then administered via an online questionnaire to randomly selected individuals from a marketing firm’s online panel. The researcher’s additionally controlled for age, gender, and perceived Internet expertise.
Results supported the hypotheses. Flow was found to impact the formation of customer satisfaction and also to make a significant contribution to website loyalty and word-of-mouth. The findings suggest that constructing online experiences that promote flow should be a high priority for marketers.
The authors suggest that those features promoting flow include content, navigation, responsiveness, and supplementary service offers. As they have no research to support this I think this is an area where future research could be of use. These findings may also be limited in their transferability. Some service categories, such as online retailers, may not operate in the same way as a site designed to produce ongoing fan-based relationships such as is found in the sites studied here. A further restriction of this study is that it does not account for a respondent’s previous involvement with a given sports franchise. It is not wild conjecture to suppose that a previous relationship with a team would predispose a more positive online experience or to reason that an attachment to a competing team would inhibit the ability of site design to induce flow.
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