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"Word-of-Mouth"
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Conceptualizing the electronic word-of-mouth process: What we know and need to know about eWOM creation, exposure, and evaluation
Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a prevalent consumer practice that has undeniable effects on the company bottom line, yet it remains an over-labeled and under-theorized concept. Thus, marketers could benefit from a practical, science-based roadmap to maximize its business value. Building on the consumer motivation–opportunity–ability framework, this study conceptualizes three distinct stages in the eWOM process: eWOM creation, eWOM exposure, and eWOM evaluation. For each stage, we adopt a dual lens—from the perspective of the consumer (who sends and receives eWOM) and that of the marketer (who amplifies and manages eWOM for business results)—to synthesize key research insights and propose a research agenda based on a multi-disciplinary systematic review of 1050 academic publications on eWOM published between 1996 and 2019. We conclude with a discussion of the future of eWOM research and practice.
Journal Article
Investigating How Word-of-Mouth Conversations About Brands Influence Purchase and Retransmission Intentions
This study investigates how the valence, channel, and social tie strength of a word-of-mouth (WOM) conversation about a brand relate to the purchase intentions and WOM retransmission intentions of WOM recipients. The analysis uses a nationally representative sample of 186,775 individual conversations about 804 different brands. The authors find insights linking WOM valence, WOM channel, and social tie strength that could not be revealed if the WOM conversations were analyzed in an aggregated form. The findings contribute to research that investigates differences between offline WOM and online WOM. The authors find that the relationship of WOM valence with purchase intentions is exacerbated when the conversation occurs offline, whereas offline conversations tend to be more strongly associated with WOM retransmission intentions regardless of the conversation's valence. The results also provide insights into how interpersonal characteristics influence WOM outcomes. Specifically, the authors find that the strength of the social tie relationship tends to influence a WOM receiver's intentions to purchase a brand; however, social tie strength has a much weaker association with a consumer's WOM retransmission intentions.
Journal Article
The Impact of User Personality Traits on Word of Mouth: Text-Mining Social Media Platforms
Word of mouth (WOM) plays an increasingly important role in shaping consumers’ behavior and preferences. In this paper, we examine whether latent personality traits of online users accentuate or attenuate the effectiveness of WOM in social media platforms. To answer this question, we leverage machine-learning methods in combination with econometric techniques utilizing a novel quasi-experiment. Our analysis yields two main results. First, there is a positive and statistically significant effect of the level of personality similarity between two social media users on the likelihood of a subsequent purchase from a recipient of a WOM message after exposure to the WOM message of the sender. In particular, exposure to WOM messages from similar users in terms of personality, rather than dissimilar users, increases the likelihood of a postpurchase by 47.58%. Second, there are statistically significant effects of specific pairwise combinations of personality characteristics of senders and recipients of WOM messages on the effectiveness of WOM. For instance, introverted users are responsive to WOM, in contrast to extroverted users. Besides this, agreeable, conscientious, and open social media users are more effective disseminators of WOM. In addition, WOM originating from users with low levels of emotional range affects similar users, whereas for high levels of emotional range, increased similarity usually has the opposite effect. The examined effects are also of significant economic importance, as, for instance, a WOM message from an extrovert user to an introvert peer increases the likelihood of a subsequent purchase by 71.28%. Our findings are robust to several alternative methods and specifications, such as controlling for latent user homophily and network structure roles based on deep-learning models. By extending the characteristics that have been theorized to affect the effectiveness of WOM from the observable to the latent space, tapping into users’ latent personality characteristics, and illustrating how companies can leverage the abundance of unstructured data in social media, our paper provides actionable insights regarding the future potential of social media advertising and advanced microtargeting based on big data and deep learning.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0768
.
Journal Article
How Online Product Reviews Affect Retail Sales: A Meta-analysis
•Valence (Es=.78), volume (Es=.41) are related to retailer sales elasticities.•Sales elasticities are significantly greater on third-party websites.•Sales elasticities are significantly greater including critics’ opinions.•Sales elasticities are greater evaluating high-involvement products.•The association of online product reviews and sales elasticities for is robust.
A growing body of research has emerged on online product reviews and their ability to elicit performance outcomes desired by retailers; yet, a common understanding of the performance implications of online product reviews has eluded us. Scholars continue to navigate an array of studies assessing different design elements of online product reviews, and various research settings and data sources. We undertake a meta-analysis of 26 empirical studies yielding 443 sales elasticities to examine how these variables relate to retail sales. Building on well-established meta-analytical methods, we address the following questions: How does review valence influence the elasticity of retailer sales? What about review volume? For which product types and usage situations do online product reviews have a greater impact on retailer sales elasticity? Which types of online reviewers and websites exert the greatest influence on retailer sales elasticity? Our study answers these important questions and provides a much needed quantitative synthesis of this burgeoning stream of research.
Journal Article
Let’s face it: When and how facial emojis increase the persuasiveness of electronic word of mouth
Facial emojis have increasingly permeated electronic word of mouth (eWOM), but the persuasive consequences of this phenomenon remain unclear. Drawing on emotions as social information (EASI) theory, this research reveals that facial emojis influence persuasion (e.g., product choice) by affecting emotional arousal and perceived ambiguity. While the effect through emotional arousal is generally positive, the effect through ambiguity depends on the emojis' function in eWOM: facial emojis that replace a verbal expression increase ambiguity and therefore reduce persuasion, whereas those that reiterate a verbal expression decrease ambiguity and therefore enhance persuasion. Both the emotional-arousal and ambiguity pathways determine the net persuasive effect. This research also explores two situations (high verbal context richness and eWOM from strong ties) where replacing facial emojis can increase persuasion. Finally, the authors show that facial emojis' persuasive power is generalizable to online brand communications, influencing key management outcomes such as click-through rates for digital ads.
Journal Article
Does Twitter matter? The impact of microblogging word of mouth on consumers’ adoption of new movies
This research provides an empirical test of the “Twitter effect,” which postulates that microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) shared through Twitter and similar services affects early product adoption behaviors by immediately disseminating consumers’ post-purchase quality evaluations. This is a potentially crucial factor for the success of experiential media products and other products whose distribution strategy relies on a hyped release. Studying the four million MWOM messages sent via Twitter concerning 105 movies on their respective opening weekends, the authors find support for the Twitter effect and report evidence of a negativity bias. In a follow-up incident study of 600 Twitter users who decided not to see a movie based on negative MWOM, the authors shed additional light on the Twitter effect by investigating how consumers use MWOM information in their decision-making processes and describing MWOM’s defining characteristics. They use these insights to position MWOM in the word-of-mouth landscape, to identify future word-of-mouth research opportunities based on this conceptual positioning, and to develop managerial implications.
Journal Article
Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities
Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing—firms' intentional influencing of consumer-to-consumer communications—is an increasingly important technique. Reviewing and synthesizing extant WOM theory, this article shows how marketers employing social media marketing methods face a situation of networked coproduction of narratives. It then presents a study of a marketing campaign in which mobile phones were seeded with prominent bloggers. Eighty-three blogs were followed for six months. The findings indicate that this network of communications offers four social media communication strategies—evaluation, embracing, endorsement, and explanation. Each is influenced by character narrative, communications forum, communal norms, and the nature of the marketing promotion. This new narrative model shows that communal WOM does not simply increase or amplify marketing messages; rather, marketing messages and meanings are systematically altered in the process of embedding them. The theory has definite, pragmatic implications for how marketers should plan, target, and leverage WOM and how scholars should understand WOM in a networked world.
Journal Article