The Influence of Goal-Directed and Experiential

Recently, it has been proposed that creatingcompellingexperiencesin the distinctiveconsump-tion environmentdefined by the Internet depends on facilitating a state of flow. Although it has been establishedthat consumersdo, in fact, experienceflow while using the Web, consumer re-searchers do not as yet have a comprehensive understanding of the specific activities during which consumers actually have these experiences. One fruitful focus of research on online consumer experiencehas been on two distinct cate-gories of consumptionbehavior—goal directed and experientialconsumptionbehavior.Draw-ing distinctionsbetween these behaviors for the Web may be particularlyimportant becausethe experiential process is, for many individuals, as or even more important than the final instru-mental result. However, the general and broad nature of flow measurement to date has pre-cluded a precise investigation of flow during goal-directed versus experiential activities. In this article, we explore this issue, investigating whether flow occurs during both experi-ential and goal-directedactivities,if experientialand goal-directedflow states differ in terms of underlyingconstructs,and what the key characteristicsare—based on prior theory—that define “types ” of flow experiencesreported on the Web. Our approach is to perform a series of quanti