We think that it might have to do with the fact that it provides an empirical test of one of the earliest pieces of research that discussed the idea that the Internet was going to be important as a marketing and communications phenomenon, argued what we believed were some very important ways it was unique from traditional media, and laid out one way to think about how consumers experience this new environment. Also, our research seems to have generated a fair amount of cross-disciplinary interest, so we also are being cited by authors outside the traditional area of marketing.

In May 1993, we heard about this cool new program called X-Mosaic. At the time, this early browser only ran on UNIX workstations. Like most computer/techno geeks at the time, we were using Archie and Veronica and Gopher and lots of FTP and other arcane programs to get stuff off the Net. Anyone who has used these apps on UNIX knows how cludgy they are, but that’s all there was. So, we installed Mosaic and were instantly and irrevocably blown away. It was literally thrilling when we first started visiting remote destinations on the Web. Perhaps because of backgrounds that are unique for most marketing professors (we got our Ph.D.s in psychology from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Lab at the University of North Carolina, emphasizing behavioral statistics and quantitative models) we were immediately struck by the possibilities. Because we were already heavy Internet users, we knew that the National Science Foundation was getting out of the backbone business and that the Net would soon have commercial traffic as its backbone. We understood the original geek Net culture and we also understood consumer behavior and commerce because we were, after all, business professors, and it just hit us that the Web browser was going to revolutionize user behavior on the Internet and so much more. So, we did what pretty much what every UNIX geek in 1993 did—we set up one of our workstations as a server, "published" content to it, and then read the logs every day, absolutely amazed that people from all over the world were coming to "visit" and that we could interact with them. The best way to describe it was as a liberating experience. As we continued to experiment with the Web more and more, we began to believe that the Internet was a revolution in democratic communication and the most important innovation since the development of the printing press. That led us to think about what this could mean for consumer behavior and the strategic marketing implications of commercializing the Internet. In 1994, we wrote an unpublished strategic paper analyzing several popular scenarios of the day (like Interactive TV and closed, proprietary networks like CompuServe and AOL at the time), along with the Internet, and predicted that the open decentralized Internet would come to dominate. After we wrote that paper, we started to think more deeply about the implications of the commercialization of the Internet, particularly from the consumer’s perspective. That led to our research on the conceptual foundations of the marketing implications of computer-mediated environments, which was published in the Journal of Marketing in 1996. That was hard to get published! Later, we decided to test the model we laid out in the 1996 JM paper, and that led to the 2000 Marketing Science paper.

Donna L. Hoffman
Professor of Management, Marketing Division
Owen Graduate School of Management
Co-Director, Sloan Center for Internet Retailing
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, USA

Thomas P. Novak
Professor of Management, Marketing Division
Owen Graduate School of Management
Co-Director, Sloan Center for Internet Retailing
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, USA