C. Offline Trust and Flow
Arguments are now made for why trust will transfer in general, and then reasons for why trust will transfer to online flow. Trust in an offline business should transfer to perceptions about an online business because of brand knowledge. Since brand knowledge is the cognitive representation of a particular brand [83], it is also defined as the personal meaning that is stored in consumer memory: descriptive and evaluative brand-related information [54]. Brand knowledge involves a synthesis of multiple factors such as awareness, attributes, benefits, images, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and experiences [54]. Among those factors, trustworthiness perceptions about the brand are implicitly included in attitude, which is believed to transfer to the other entity (refer to Figure 2 in [54]). Thus, consumer trust in a certain brand will transfer to products and services related to that brand, regardless of channel.
The concept of flow involves the optimized processing of experiences that occur when customers navigate or browse the Internet. Online interactivity between companies and their customers is carried out through flow [44, 101]. Flow helps explain certain aspects of human-computer interaction [20].
Figure 3 shows the research model that will now be justified. A common measure of flow is the level of intrinsic enjoyment of an activity, not unlike the emotional response of pleasure in environmental psychology [55]. In an online environment, flow is based on three aspects: shopping enjoyment, perceived control, and concentration/attention. This study, accordingly, defines flow using these three aspects. Just as shopping enjoyment is important in offline markets, it is important online, where it can have a significant impact on customers’ attitudes and intentions about online shopping [49, 55]. Internet shopping does not always provide the emotionally fulfilling experience of conventional shopping because it is mostly limited to two-dimensional text and pictures [55].
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