The proliferation of mobile devices means that mobile‐generated customer reviews are on the rise, though research into their peculiarities and appraisals is rare. With field data and a scenario experiment, the current research demonstrates how recipients perceive mobile‐generated customer reviews fundamentally differently from nonmobile‐generated reviews. First, behavioral field data provide evidence that consumers discount the helpfulness of mobile reviews due to their text‐specific content and style particularities. Second, the scenario experiment shows that identifying a review as written on a mobile device lowers recipients’ perceptions of its value, but only if they use a nonmobile device to read the review. Recipients rely on device information as a source cue to assess compatibility. If they perceive themselves as compatible with the device, recipients perceive the review as more helpful because they attribute the review's content to the quality of the reviewed object; if they regard it as incompatible, recipients assume the review reflects the personal dispositions of the reviewer and discount its helpfulness. Managers of online opinion platforms thus must acknowledge the peculiarities of mobile‐generated reviews and the impact of tagging content as mobile or not.
Physical products (e.g., cars, smartphones) increasingly evolve into dynamic service platforms that allow for customization through fee-based activation of restricted add-on features throughout their lifecycle. The authors refer to this emerging phenomenon as “internal product upgrades”. Drawing on normative expectations literature, this research examines pitfalls of internal product upgrades that marketers need to understand. Six experimental studies in two different contexts (consumer-electronics, automotive) reveal that consumers respond less favorably to internal (vs. external) product upgrades. The analyses show that customer-perceived betrayal, which results from increased feature ownership perceptions, drives the effects. Moreover, this research identifies three boundary conditions: it shows that the negative effects are attenuated when (1) the company (vs. consumer) executes the upgrading, and (2) consumers upgrade an intangible (vs. tangible) feature. Finally, consumers react less negatively when (3) the base product is less relevant to their self-identity.
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