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networks (Rogers, 1986; Sheth, 1992). As this evolution takes place, the
marketing communication flows that support commercial activity are reversing from
marketer-consumer to consumer-marketer (Sheth, 1992); consumers are begin-
ning to seek out the companies and products that interest them rather than relying
on traditional mass marketing activities to inform and persuade them about
opportunities.
As this idea of the segment of one develops in practice, it seems clear
that the
World Wide Web will present potent capabilities for reaching and commercially
serving consumers (Drèze & Zufryden, 1997). However, throughout this evolu-
tionary process, it also seems clear that marketers must begin asking questions
about the unique characteristics of this new commercial medium; one critical
question will concern the nature of motivations, which bring consumers to utilize this
new medium for commercial purposes (Stafford & Stafford, 1998). This consid-
eration implies not
only a need to understand what might motivate consumers to
attend to marketing efforts on the Web, but also what might motivate them to use
commercial Web sites, in general. In short, what are consumers’
uses for, and
associated gratifications in use of, commercial Web sites?
The Internet is experiencing phenomenal growth; it is growing so fast that
researchers have a hard time simply keeping up with its current size and likely future
growth. In previous years, the growth rate was estimated at between ten percent
(Rubenstein, 1995) and twenty percent per month
(Thomsen, 1997), with early
estimates of the Internet audience suggesting that there were between 30 and 50
million users (Fox, 1995; Kambil, 1995). Audience size was expected to be near
150 million by the millennium (Barker & Groenne, 1997), but more current reports
(Applegate, McFarlan & McKenney, 1999) placed 1995 audience levels at 40
million, with 100 million consumers logged on in 1998 and estimates of one billion
Internet users by 2005. As of 1999, at least one home in four in the U.S. had Internet
access (Clark, 1999), and the number of registered Internet commerce sites nearly
tripled, from 600,000 to 1.7 million, in a one-year period monitored between 1996
and 1997 (Applegate et al., 1999).
This combined pattern of growth among both consumers and businesses in the
use of the Internet underscores its obvious utility for making connections between
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