Exploring the effectiveness of emotional and rational user-generated contents in digital tourism platforms

Abstract

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most important notions that influences tourists’ decision-making. However, the nature of UGC is still underexplored in the literature. The present study aimed to examine the impact of two different forms of UGC (i.e., emotional and rational) on tourists’ perceived values and their subsequent behavioural responses. Using the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model, the two forms of UGC were conceptualised as informational stimuli, while tourists’ overall value assessment (i.e., perceived values, including emotional, functional, relational, and entitativity values) of the utility of tourism activities in the tourism platform were conceptualised as organisms. Tourists’ behavioural responses were demonstrated by impulse buying and future purchase intention. Data from 538 respondents were collected using online survey and analysed using PLS-SEM. The results revealed that both emotional and rational UGC have a significant impact on tourists’ perceived values, which in turn strengthen impulse buying and future purchase intention. This study not only contributes to the tourism marketing literature by empirically examining the impacts of two forms of UGC on tourists’ organisms and responses, but also provides meaningful insights for tourism marketers to facilitate UGC to drive tourists’ perceived values and their subsequent behaviour.

Why do young people do things for the environment? The effect of perceived values on pro-environmental behaviour

“…Second, PLS-SEM is suitable when predicting key target constructs in a research model (Chin et al , 2020). Third, PLS-SEM has been used in previous studies on environmentalism to perform data analysis and is suitable for exploratory research with a combination of explanatory and predictive methods (Cheung et al , 2021; Wut et al , 2020).…”

“…In addition, each value is independent and makes a unique contribution to each given choice (van Boerdonk et al , 2021). The concept has been empirically tested in different contexts, such as social media brand pages (Kim et al , 2011; Shi et al , 2016), tourism (Cheung et al , 2021; Sharma and Nayak, 2019) and environmental consumption (Bu et al , 2020; Yu et al , 2021; Garg et al , 2021). Thus, the present study uses CVT to explore the role of young people’s perceived values in establishing their pro-environmental attitudes and intentions.…”

Co-creation of value in smart ecosystems: past trends and future directions in tourism literature

“…The studies analyzed emphasize the combination of areas such as customer engagement, customer participation and user-generated content . The study by Cheung et al (2021) contributes to the tourism marketing literature by empirically examining the impacts of two forms of user-generated content on tourists’ perceived values and their behavioral responses. Many studies have been conducted on user behavior’s influencing factors in virtual communities (such as co-creation and participants’ value-in-use).…”

The Factors Influencing Users’ Trust in and Loyalty to Consumer-to-Consumer Secondhand Marketplace Platform

“…Information interactions showed the largest effect size for the mutual trust level of Karrot users. Cheung et al [ 67 ] discovered that emotional and information interactions are important drivers of consumers’ perceived value based on the SOR framework. Another prior study identified that interactions between consumers have an impact on evoking emotional attachment and behavioral intentions grounded on service-dominant logic [ 58 ].…”