Antecedents of Children’s Satisfaction with Company Websites and their Links with Brand Awareness
This chapter focuses on children’s satisfaction with the use of commercial websites. The authors address two relevant gaps in extant literature: children as users of Information Technology and the concept of Information System success itself. Children’s use of IT needs focus since this age group has been largely neglected by extant IS research. The concept of success needs further research because the research results on this dependent variable have been controversial, and there is still no full agreement on the antecedents of success. In this chapter, the authors therefore contextualize the classic Information Systems success model of DeLone and McLean to IS success with children. They carried out a survey of a sample of 76 children aged 11 to 14, located in various cities in France. The results show that children get higher brand awareness if they are more satisfied with the kids website of the brand. The chapter finds the satisfaction with the site depends upon the personalization that is possible and the presence of dynamic elements on the site. Characters and animations that help navigating the site are also appreciated. A good presentation of the site’s rules could not be shown to be a significant antecedent of satisfaction. Qualitative data that was gathered suggests that children are not really aware of the link between symbols they see on the site and products that are sold.