Transfer From Offline Trust to Key Online Perceptions: An Empirical Study
Kun Chang Lee,* In Won Kang** and D. Harrison McKnight***
*Professor of MIS
School of Business Administration
Sungkyunkwan University
Seoul 110-745, Korea
leekc@skku.ac.kr
**Assistant Professor
School of Economics & International Trade
Kyunghee University
Seoul 130-701, Korea
iwkang@khu.ac.kr
***Assistant Professor
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1121
mcknight@bus.msu.edu
Forthcoming IEEE-TEM
Index Terms: Trust, trust transfer, structural assurance, online banking, online trust, marketing channel, flow, website satisfaction, extent of use, coherence, cognitive overhead.
Transfer From Offline Trust to Key Online Perceptions: An Empirical Study
Abstract- Research has provided little evidence that trust in an offline bank can encourage adoption of the bank’s online business. Yet more and more brick-and-mortar banks and other businesses are investing in online websites that supposedly “leverage” positive consumer impressions of their offline business. The main purpose of this study is to test empirically whether or not trust in an offline bank transfers (i.e., influences) perceptions about that company’s online bank. In order to do so, we analyze how trust in an offline bank influences four perceptions about its online banking counterpart (flow, structural assurance, perceived website satisfaction and perceived extent of future use). The study tests the hypothesized influence of offline trust using a sample of 199 South Korean consumers responding about offline and online banking. Results show that offline trust influences all four online perceptions, just as proposed. These effects were especially prominent among respondents new to online banking. Thus, offline-to-online transfer should be considered when designing strategies for online channels. This study fills a key research gap by examining transfer of cognitive beliefs from an offline to an online setting.
I. INTRODUCTION
Trust is a central construct in the study of commercial transactions, both in information systems (IS) and such reference disciplines as marketing, sociology, and organizational behavior [27, 31, 73, 75, 95]. Trust plays an important role in both offline and online commercial transactions [106]. Several IS studies on the role of trust in electronic commerce (e-commerce) have been conducted in recent years [5, 33, 34, 36, 43, 50, 58, 71, 80, 81, 96, 103]. Especially, with the advent of online marketplaces on the Internet as a new business paradigm, trust has been dealt with as a crucial enabling factor for business-to-consumer relationships [33, 50] as well for business-to-business marketplaces [80].
A number of trust constructs including institution-based trust [70, 81, 108] have been defined [34, 72]. Interpersonal or inter-party trust definitions largely fall into two categories:
Willingness to become vulnerable to another [67, 71], such as “a willingness to rely on an exchange partner in whom one has confidence” [74].
Positive perceptions or beliefs about the attributes of another. This includes the perception of “confidence in the exchange partner’s reliability and integrity” [75], and the perceived credibility (honesty) and benevolence of a particular target [30, 56]. Several have listed integrity, benevolence, and ability as attributes [8, 34, 71]. In buyer-seller relational exchanges, which are the most popular forms of transactions between persons or companies, two dimensions of trust are perhaps most pertinent. The first, credibility/honesty, is the expectation that words or written statements can be relied upon or depended upon [61]. The second, benevolence, is the extent to which one partner is genuinely interested in the other’s welfare and is motivated to seek mutual gain [57].
Trust is important in relational exchanges because it allows partners to transcend short-run inequities or risks to concentrate on long-term profits or gains [73]. Personal relational exchanges are typified by qualities such as intensity, interaction frequency, relationship duration, and future relational expectations [48]. These qualities inherent in offline relational exchange facilitate trust building. By contrast, trust is more difficult to create online because parties do not typically have intense, face-to-face contact that enables trust to be built through tangible cues. One can enter a bank, for example, and learn to trust the bank tellers through repeated personal interactions that provide interpersonal cues. One can also become secure quite rapidly with the bank institution itself by entering the bank and observing the look-and-feel of the building, its furnishings, and the banking procedures—physical cues on which to base trust [71]. By contrast, the online bank has no such physical cues for trust building, although its website provides certain online cues.
One way to solve this trust building problem is to transfer trust from a known brick-and-mortar entity to positive perceptions in the unknown online entity. We postulate that trust gained through experience with an offline company positively influences key customer perceptions of the same company’s online division, such as website satisfaction or intention to use its site. Stewart [96], who called this phenomenon “trust transfer,” applied it specifically to business-to-consumer e-commerce in terms of buying computers online. The results revealed that websites that had a picture and street address of their land-based store generated a higher consumer intention to buy from the store. Stewart [96] did not use specific trust-related perceptions about the offline store to predict online perceptions, a gap this paper addresses. Today’s Internet-oriented world has made it even more important for marketers to study the interplay between offline and online channels when analyzing customer behavior. Those who do so are rewarded with a level of predictive power that affords them a distinct advantage over their competitors. Potentially, this study contributes by testing an instance of the effects of offline bank trust on four specific consumer perceptions regarding the bank’s online counterpart.
|
