Online Marketing Effectiveness – the influence of information load and digital literacy, a cross-country comparison

The objective of much promotional material is to create attitudes about a product or service with existing and prospective consumers. The effectiveness of the promotion in generating such attitudes is partly dependent upon the ability of these actual and prospective consumers to process the information provided in the promotional material, which then impacts on their decision. The aim of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of a promotional website under different information load conditions, for consumers from countries that differ in their digital information literacy. To achieve this goal, an experiment was conducted which was designed to manage the amount of information shown to participants from two different countries (the United Kingdom and Spain). The results suggest that both the main and interaction effect of information load and digital literacy have an impact on a website’s effectiveness. This implies that promotional websites need to be not only culturally but also cognitively adapted.