Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) generation in new media platforms: The role of regulatory focus and collective dissonanc
- PDF / 240,577 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 139 Views
Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) generation in new media platforms: The role of regulatory focus and collective dissonance Dongwoo Shin & Ji Hee Song & Abhijit Biswas
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract In this research, we examine the role of two motivational forces associated with creation of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM): regulatory focus and collective dissonance. Our studies show that generation of eWOM is enhanced by regulatory fit, while traditional WOM is dominated by the negativity effect. In study 1A, we show that prevention-focused consumers produce stronger intentions to post eWOM when they undergo a negative compared to a positive service experience. In study 1B, we find that promotion-focused consumers are more likely to post eWOM in reaction to a positive service experience when one's self-construal is independent. The final study shows that due to collective dissonance, consumers have greater intentions to create eWOM when their experiences are inconsistent with others' postings. We discuss the implications of these results for the development and management of eWOM communication in virtual communities. Keywords Electronic word-of-mouth . New media . Regulatory focus . Collective dissonance . Word-of-mouth The advent of the Internet has resulted in considerable shift in the asymmetrical informational relationship which existed previously between consumers and marketers (Urban 2005). Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)—any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, The first author of this article is Dongwoo Shin and Ji Hee Song is the corresponding author.
D. Shin : J. H. Song (*) School of Business Administration, University of Seoul, Jeonnong-Dong 90, Dongdaemun-Gu, Seoul 130-743, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] D. Shin e-mail: [email protected] A. Biswas Department of Marketing, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Mark Lett
which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004)—provides a good illustration of the results of such structural shifts in the communication environment. By creating and distributing eWOM, consumers are now playing a major role in generating marketing information and can no longer be considered passive users of marketer-provided information (Berthon et al. 2008). In fact, the unique characteristics of the Internet as a media platform may expedite the motivational process of eWOM generation and encourage people to disseminate the kind of information that does not travel very well in traditional WOM (tWOM) contexts. Although leading marketing scholars (Varadarajan and Yadav 2009) have emphasized the importance of understanding both generation and consumption of eWOM, majority of the studies have focused only on the consumption of consumer-generated information (Duan et al. 2008; Trusov et al. 2009). Furthermore, a handful of studies examining the generation of eWOM have limited their scope
Data Loading...
