MEDIA MEETS RETAIL – RE-EVALUATING CONTENT QUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF B2C E-COMMERCE

Abstract

In the increasingly competitive Internet business landscape, content is more and more employed for marketing purposes. While online retailers are raising investments in content to promote their online shops, media companies are starting to monetize their content by building own e-commerce platforms. The rationale behind these content-driven commerce approaches is to create a satisfying online shopping experience and, thus, to foster customer loyalty. However, whether content is a suitable means to these ends has not yet been proven. One obstacle is that there is no measurement instrument that captures all relevant characteristics of content on a website. We seek to fill this gap by developing a unified content quality scale in the context of B2C e-commerce. In this paper, we report on the first two of five steps in the scale development process and provide an initial proposal for a formativeformative second-order content quality construct. In contrast to previous measures, our scale considers hedonic characteristics of content and thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the concept. Furthermore, both media companies and online retailers can benefit from this scale by applying it to evaluate the effects of their content-driven commerce approaches on customer satisfaction and loyalty.