EWOM firestorm: young consumers and online community

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to examine the influence of homophily in an online community and the effect of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) consensus on young consumers’ attitudes. Design/methodology/approach This study implemented an experimental research design using a two (low/high homophily) × two (low/high eWOM consensus) mixed factorial design. This study explores young consumers’ changes in brand attitude after encountering negative eWOM. Findings The results indicate that a high consensus of negative eWOM among online community members leads to significant changes in attitude, while a low consensus of negative eWOM does not produce such an effect. Negative eWOM from either high or low homophilous sources produces significant changes in attitude. There are significant attitude changes when a strong consensus of negative eWOM is received from a source with a high level of homophily. Research limitations/implications Service failures in offline service settings lead to the dissemination of negative eWOM on social media. To handle and prevent social media crises, researchers should understand online crises antecedents relating to information characteristics i.e. eWOM consensus and characteristics of online community members to evaluate the crises impact. Brands should monitor tone and dialogue of online community member on social media to remedy and diminish any damage done to their brand image from negative eWOM. Originality/value This study contributes to the application of social network theory by understanding the role of nodes on negative eWOM effect in social media.

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“…There are many ways the existing research model can be enhanced for future research. In establishing a more comprehensive model, we encourage researchers to incorporate other relevant variables either as direct predictors, mediators or moderators such as third-person effect of positive and negative eWOMs (Bi et al , 2019), message quality (Le et al , 2018), brand-user-imagery fit (Lee and Watkins, 2016; Pelletier et al , 2020) and message consensus (Suwandee et al , 2019). The inclusion is expected to increase the variance explained in the criterion variables.…”

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“…Hudson et al (2015) identify positive associations between social media, brand relationship quality, emotions and WOM, and it is argued that “such interactions in the social media bear the potential of recreating the perception of brands as sacred to young consumers in Asia” (Das and Mandal, 2016, p. 427). Suwandee et al (2020) address the firms need to control and monitor negative impacts on social media which influence young consumer brand attitudes. Otherwise, a brand or firm may enter an online firestorm or a social media crisis.…”

“…These communications then spread globally via the internet, and hence transformed into eWOM. eWOM is defined as “any positive or negative online content generated and disseminated by consumers about their experiences of a particular service or organisation” (Suwandee et al , 2020, p. 2). Prasad et al (2017) divide consumers’ activities into two main groups – consumption and contribution.…”