Cutting Through the Online Review Jungle — Investigating Selective eWOM Processing

Abstract

Consumers frequently rely on online reviews, a prominent form of electronic word-ofmouth (eWOM), before taking a purchase decision. However, consumers are usually confronted with hundreds of reviews for a single product or service, as well as rich information cues on review websites (review texts, helpfulness ratings, author information, etc.). In turn, consumers face more information cues on online review websites than they can or want to process, and are likely to proceed selectively. This paper investigates selective processing of such eWOM information cues. Results of study 1, an exploratory study using verbal protocols, confirm that consumers display selective eWOM processing patterns and are able to articulate them. Study 2 develops and applies a measurement instrument to capture these patterns. A subsequent cluster analysis on members of a large-scale online panel (N=2,295) indicates five prominent eWOM processing types, termed "The Efficients", "The Meticulous", "The Quality-Evaluators", "The Cautious Critics", and "The Swift Pessimists". Insights of this study can help firms to better understand consumers' eWOM processing and improve the user-friendliness of online review websites.

How online word‐of‐mouth impacts receivers

“…Further, WOM is often so voluminous that even motivated receivers may adopt selective processing strategies, resulting in attention to only certain WOM components. For example, some receivers (i.e., swift pessimists ) pay little attention to review text and rely mostly on negatively valenced reviews (Gottschalk & Mafael, ).…”

“…The majority of current research assumes a motivated receiver who is seeking WOM, and is therefore paying attention to components of WOM such as summary statistics, message content, or sender characteristics. Future work on the first step in the WOM journey could consider additional motivations or selective processing strategies (e.g., Gottschalk & Mafael, ), and how these affect later steps in the receivers’ journey. Alternately, researchers could examine whether motivation and selective processing work simultaneously or sequentially to affect receivers’ consumption of WOM and therefore its impact.…”

Online Review Helpfulness and Firms’ Financial Performance: An Empirical Study in a Service Industry

“…The aforementioned mechanisms not only help alleviate consumers' information overload [48,72,73] but also help online customers to immediately focus on those reviews that are perceived to have the higher diagnosticity [82,150] as their information cues are more relevant [110]. Moreover, they help online consumers already familiar with ORs to carry out selective eWOM processing to deal with information overload [55].…”

“…Before a real-world purchase, consumers will focus on products/services covered by positively valenced reviews rather than negatively valenced reviews. When deciding between two or more alternative products/services covered by ORs displaying the same positive ratings, the degree of ORH might work as a facilitating heuristic [36] allowing customers to enhance their selective eWOM processing [55] prior to choosing between two or more positively rated alternatives. As such, helpfulness votes work as a "decision-making cue" [134] that helps consumers that have already a proxy of the quality of the product/ service reviewed (i.e., the ratings) to opt for those alternatives whose positive reviews are voted as more helpful.…”

“…In the Future Research section of their study, Raguseo and Vitari [121, p. 265] emphasize that "further studies could evaluate the impact of this feature [online review helpfulness] on the financial performance that is achieved by hotels." The urgency of these calls for research on the commercial and financial effects of ORH in the hospitality sector is critical, as hotel customers increasingly use helpful ORs to make purchasing decisions [54], with some groups of consumers using them as a selective processing mechanism [55]. Moreover, while a few scholars have analyzed the direct effects of OR valence and volume on firm performance (e.g., [28,95,101,103,133,151]), to the best of our knowledge no study has yet examined if and to what extent ORH interacts with other OR features such as OR valence and volume in affecting (hotel) financial performance, except for two studies conducted on the movie sector [86,134] and examining products rather than services.…”