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Factors influencing consumer perceptions of brand trust online

Hong-Youl Ha

An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.

Introduction

One of the major aims of building brand trust is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and thereby enhance a business performance. Many researchers have conducted a general consensus-that brand trust is established through a combination of familiarity, security, privacy, word-of-mouth, advertising, and brand image (Chow and Holden, 1997; Delgodo-Ballester and ´ Munuera-Aleman, 2001; Garbarino and Johnson, 1999; Hoffman et al., 1998; Wernerfelt, 1991). These studies, however, have not explored building brand trust on the Web. While it may be argued that brand trust is an underlying dimension of brand loyalty, the latter is composed of such a vast number of components that it would be futile to consider it only in general terms. Indeed, brand trust is extremely important for increasing customers’ loyalty towards brands on the Web. For example, an auction site such as eBay.com may have very reasonable pricing, but the potential consumer may find the product performance questionable. As a result, a low brand trust may counterbalance high brand satisfaction to reduce the probability of purchase of a product or service on the Web. In contrast, a high level of brand trust may ultimately convert a satisfied customer into a loyal one. Thus, brand trust and its individual determinants constitute the specific objective of this study. A second line of research closely related to brand trust on the Web is familiarity analysis- when building the trusting brand relationship (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001; Garbarino and Johnson, 1999; Hoffman et al., 1998; Tractinsky et al., 1999; Urban et al., 2000). Brand familiarity is a continuous variable that reflects a consumer’s level of direct and indirect experiences with a product (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987). According to Kania (2001),...