Conclusions
Designing and planning physical environments has been a significant topic in the
services marketing literature. Encounters between organisations and individuals on
the Internet, largely via web pages, share many of the features of service encounters,
namely intangibility and perishability, inseparability of production and consumption,
and heterogeneity in delivery quality. Designing and planning the virtual environment
so as to “control”, show empathy and create optimal experiences for browsers is
therefore as important in cyberspace as in real space. “Flow” is used by individuals to
describe their mental state when performing activities at the best of times. On the
Internet, moreover, flow from a site has been found to correlate with both that site’s
evaluation and an intention to return to it. Taking flow as a related concept to approach
behaviour, this paper has attempted to translate recent research on flow and the
Internet into the S-O-R model, with the aim of enabling organisations to understand
user response better and to plan for optimal user responses.