How Consumers Evaluate eWOM (Electronic Word-of-Mouth) Messages

Doh, Sun-Jae; Hwang, Jang‐Sun

doi:10.1089/cpb.2008.0109

Cited by 368 publications

(240 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Drawing on the information richness theory (Daft and Lengel 1986), the current study enhances the understanding by a closer scrutiny into how consumers with different levels of product knowledge will perceive the information richness of positive versus negative eWOM for experience goods such as leisure farm tour and search goods such as digital camera. Overall, this study's findings are in accord with the results of previous studies that have tested eWOM valence (Doh and Hwang 2009;Halstead 2002;Harrison-Walker 2001;Park and Lee 2009), despite the fact that no prior study has examined the eWOM content in a narrative structure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…A number of studies have dealt with either extremely positive or extremely negative WOM (Halstead 2002;Harrison-Walker 2001;Heitmann et al 2007); however, there have been few attempts (e.g. Doh and Hwang 2009;Park and Lee 2009) to directly compare the effectiveness of positive eWOM with negative eWOM when product type is considered. This study complements the past eWOM research by more comprehensively taking both product and individual characteristics into consideration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While studies have shown that negatively framed eWOM is more influential than positively framed eWOM (e.g. Park and Lee 2009); others declined this viewpoint (Doh and Hwang 2009;Gershoff et al 2003). The mixed findings suggest that there is a need to further specify the situations in which eWOM valence will cause various effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Education, Educational Services and their Quality

Dulaimi¹

2016

JMM

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Rich information facilitates consumer buying judgment and decision-making, and therefore enhances marketing communication effectiveness. Drawing on the information richness theory, this study attempts to address how valence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), product type and consumer knowledge will yield different levels of eWOM richness perception for experience goods versus search goods. The results based on a three-way experimental study with 156 valid responses suggest that negative eWOM has a stronger effect in producing eWOM information richness than does positive eWOM, and such effect is more pronounced for a leisure farm tour (experience goods) than for digital camera (search goods). The tendency that negative eWOM will provide richer information for the leisure farm tour is more evident for high-knowledge consumers than for low-knowledge consumers. The study's results caution against the aggravated harm of negative eWOM incurred from the dissatisfactory experience of a leisure farm tour. The managerial implications for the practitioners are provided.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Education, Educational Services and their Quality

Dulaimi¹

2016

JMM

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“…Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has an impact on customer attitudes and consequently on booking/purchase intentions (Park et al, 2007;Doh and Hwang, 2009;Ladhari and Michaud, 6 2015; Book et al, 2015). Some studies in the marketing field demonstrate that companies' financial performance can be affected by online reviews (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006;Liu, 2006;Dellarocas et al, 2007;Cheung et al, 2009).…”

Section: Ewom Impacts On Purchasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of e-word-of-mouth on hotel occupancy rate

Viglia¹,

Minazzi

Buhalis

2016

IJCHM

266

186

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Purpose -Online reviews have become increasingly important for customer decisionmaking. The hotel industry represents a noticeable case. Consumer reviews posted on websites such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor, and Venere.com play a critical role in consumers' choice of a hotel. For this reason a number of recent studies analyses different aspects of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate their effects in terms of hotel occupancy rates.Design/methodology/approach -The paper measures through regression analysis the impact of three dimensions of consumer reviews (i.e. review score, review variance and review volume) on the occupancy rates of 346 hotels located in Rome, isolating a number of other factors that might also affect demand.Findings -Review score is the dimension with the highest impact. The results suggest that, after controlling for other variables, a one-point increase in the review score is associated to an increase in the occupancy rate by 7.5 percentage points. Regardless the review score, the number of reviews has a positive effect, but with decreasing returns, implying that the higher the number of reviews, the lower the beneficial effect in terms of occupancy rates is.Practical implications -The findings quantify the strong association of online reviews to occupancy rates suggesting the use of appropriate reputational management systems to increase hotel occupancy and therefore performance.2 Originality/Value -A major contribution of this paper is its comprehensiveness in analysing the relation between online consumer reviews and occupancy across a heterogeneous sample of hotels.

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“…Indeed, there is evidence suggesting that ratings information may not be credible, since much of the feedback appears to be skewed or untruthful. For example, research suggests that when ratings are too positive, users do not find them to be credible [29]. Mackiewicz [63] examined the ratings of 640 online products and found that more than 48 % of all products rated received 5 stars (i.e., the highest ranking), suggesting a positivity bias in ratings.…”

Section: The Use Of Commercial Product Ratings To Evaluate Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mitigating risk in ecommerce transactions: perceptions of information credibility and the role of user-generated ratings in product quality and purchase intention

Flanagin

Metzger

Pure

et al. 2014

Electron Commer Res

196

114

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Although extremely popular, electronic commerce environments often lack information that has traditionally served to ensure trust among exchange partners. Digital technologies, however, have created new forms of "electronic word-of-mouth," which offer new potential for gathering credible information that guides consumer behaviors. We conducted a nationally representative survey and a focused experiment to assess how individuals perceive the credibility of online commercial information, particularly as compared to information available through more traditional channels, and to evaluate the specific aspects of ratings information that affect people's attitudes toward ecommerce. Survey results show that consumers rely heavily on web-based information as compared to other channels, and that ratings information is critical in the evaluation of the credibility of online commercial information. Experimental results indicate that ratings are positively associated with perceptions of product quality and purchase intention, but that people attend to average product ratings, but not to the number of ratings or to the combination of the average and the number of ratings together. Thus suggests that in spite of valuing the web and ratings as sources of commercial information, people use ratings information suboptimally by potentially privileging small numbers of ratings that could be idiosyncratic. In addition, product quality is shown to mediate the relationship between user ratings and purchase intention. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are considered for ecommerce scholars, consumers, and vendors.Keywords Ecommerce · Credibility · User-generated content · Amazon · Product ratings · Electronic word of mouth · Information credibility · Purchase intention · Product quality · User ratings People are increasingly relying on web-based commercial information for electronic commerce ("ecommerce") transactions that range from small personal items to home purchases [45]. Retail ecommerce sales in the U.S. currently constitute roughly 4 % of total retail sales, which translates to almost 40 billion dollars annually [10]. The number of Americans who have purchased a product online has steadily increased since 2000, and a majority (66 %) now report having made at least one online purchase [46]. An even larger percentage (93 %) has used the Internet for ecommerce-related activities, including researching information about a product they are thinking of buying, with more than a quarter of Americans reporting they do this on a daily basis [49]. In fact, over the last decade the number of people either researching or buying a product or service online has nearly doubled, a trend that holds true across a wide range of ecommerce-related activities [45].Despite its popularity, online commercial transactions often lack elements that have traditionally served to ensure trust and credibility among exchange parties. Indeed, varying "patronage modes" embody different levels of risk for the consumer, which incr...

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How Consumers Evaluate eWOM (Electronic Word-of-Mouth) Messages

Cited by 368 publications

References 2 publications

Education, Educational Services and their Quality

Education, Educational Services and their Quality

The influence of e-word-of-mouth on hotel occupancy rate

Mitigating risk in ecommerce transactions: perceptions of information credibility and the role of user-generated ratings in product quality and purchase intention

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