The Effect of Online Unpaid Reviews made by Renowned Vloggers: the Case of Smartphones

Abstract

The main aim of the study is to establish the effects of online unpaid reviews posted by internet celebrities (renowned vloggers) on audience’s purchase intention, product recommendation and engagement on the platform. The empirical research conducted for this purpose revealed that audience’s attitude towards the vlogger is positively affected by the perceived attributes of the vlogger - trustworthiness, expertise and attractiveness. Further, the attitudes towards the vlogger reflect on the attitudes towards the reviewed product, and both have positive effects on the purchase intention, product recommendations and actions on Youtube. Despite being influenced by the attitudes towards the vlogger and the product, the attitudes towards the video content don’t have a significant impact on audience’s intentions. Additional multi-group analysis showed significant differences based on audience’s gender and their familiarity with the vlogger.

How Do Online Reviews on YouTube Construct Perception?

“…This was also considered positive by the audience. It was in line with [22] who stated that perception was influenced by the attitudes towards the vlogger and the product.…”

“…Based on these considerations, there has been no research that uses sentiment codes to express consumer perceptions and attitudes towards electronic product reviews developed through the Nvivo method and internet ethnography. In addition, current research on attitudes towards electronic products is only limited to certain products, for example [22] only used smartphone products. The difference is, this research seeks to reveal the audience's perceived attitudes and buying interest in electronic products reviewed online via YouTube channels through sentiment codes and internet ethnography and pragmatics.…”

Vlogger’s Reputation: Connecting Trust and Perceived Usefulness of Vloggers’ Recommendation with Intention to Shop Online

“…Trust is defined as a 'perceived credibility and benevolence of a target of trust (i.e., the other party)' (Doney & Cannon, 1997). Alternatively, trust is the perceived honesty, reliability, and capacity of the source to provide impartial information (Moldovan & Ciornea, 2019;Roy, 2006). In the context of celebrity or spokesman, prior literature has considered celebrity characteristics in determining consumer's attitudes and purchase decisions (Awasthi & Choraria, 2015;Bergkvist & Zhou, 2016).…”

“…Vloggers share a few characteristics with bloggers, the main difference is the medium of sharing of the content such as bloggers post content in the written form compared to vloggers who share the content through videos (Fisalbon, 2019), also referred to as video bloggers (Ladhari et al, 2020). Vloggers often become internet celebrity and share their views and experiences related to brands and often act as indirect brand ambassadors (Moldovan & Ciornea, 2019). Vloggers frequently share daily life events, activities, opinions, and preferences on SNS, often engaging in two-way interaction with their followers and hence become opinion leaders (Casaló et al, 2008; Djafarova & Trofimenko, 2019; Sokolova & Kefi, 2020).…”

Does Social Media Influencer Credibility Affect Attitudes and Engagement Behaviour? - Empirical Evidence

“…R4: Do consumer attitudes toward the video content affect consumer attitudes toward the X70 brand model?Other than that,Lu et al (2014) studied Taiwanese blogs and found highly positive attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts, which improves purchase intention. In the other work byMoldovan and Ciornea (2019), consumer attitude towards vloggers and products is significantly related to actions on YouTube to recommend the product. On that account, this study proposed to scrutinise the social media engagement intentional behaviour measurement into more detailed segments as inCao et al (2021).…”