Eelm: a replication and enhancement of the elaboration likelihood model for computer-mediated environments
Authors: Naveen Donthu
Venue:  (2003)

Although the Internet has been used for advertising nearly a decade, the viability of the Internet as an effective advertising medium is still being debated. Studies citing very low click-through rates of banner ads have brought the usefulness of the medium into question. We argue that not only is the Internet a useful medium for marketing communications, but also it has characteristics that may make the Internet especially attractive to advertisers. Past research and industry reports contend that banner ads are dead because their click-through rates have dropped from well in the double digits shortly after their first use in 1994 to often less than one percent now. We argue however that click-through is not a fair descriptor of ad effectiveness, and present a model that we hypothesize will determine the Internet's impact on attitude change. This new perspective allows us to show that the Internet is useful for advertising despite the lack of direct response. To this end, we are using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as a basis for research. In 1982, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo published their book Attitudes and Persuasion. In this work, they developed a theoretical model of attitude change as it applies to consumers. This was called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), and it suggested that consumers' propensity to cognitively elaborate on messages is affected by certain personal, environmental, and situational variables; the most important of these being personal involvement. Since then, the model has been replicated and validated by a variety of researchers, many of which we will discuss in later sections of this manuscript. The majority of these researchers, while using different approaches to examine the ELM, found supporting evidence for the two main tenets of Petty and Cacioppo's work. In addition to the above mentioned theory that personal involvement is a major determinant of consumers' likelihood to process messages, it has been shown that there are two routes to consumer persuasion, i.e. two ways that consumers can process message elements to form attitudes. These two ways, or routes, are called the &ldquo;central route&rdquo; and the &ldquo;peripheral route&rdquo;. Using an experimental design, we utilize a method similar to that used in Petty and Cacioppo's study, adding relevant Internet variables of Web expertise, attitude toward the website, and trust in the Internet. All of these variables moderate the existing ELM to make substantial changes to the way in which attitude change is effected in computer mediated environments. The experiment involves subjects viewing a website with experimentally controlled banner ads. The ads are manipulated on peripheral cues and message arguments, and the situation is manipulated on both product involvement and message involvement. We believe that: (1) Attitude toward the website directly influences attitude toward the ad; (2) Web experts tend to ignore peripheral cues, and; (3) Lack of trust in the Internet acts as a blocking mechanism between cognitions and attitudes.