Persuasiveness of eWOM Communications: Literature Review and Suggestions for Future Research
Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) plays an important part in consumer purchase decision. The way consumers perceive the persuasiveness of eWOM message can affect their attitude, and purchase intention, and hence sales. Thus, the topic of persuasiveness of e
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School of Management, Swansea University, Swansea, UK {e.ismagilova.840405,e.l.slade,m.d.williams}@swansea.ac.uk
Abstract. Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) plays an important part in consumer purchase decision. The way consumers perceive the persuasiveness of eWOM message can affect their attitude, and purchase intention, and hence sales. Thus, the topic of persuasiveness of eWOM communications has received much attention from scholars. The objective of this paper is to provide a brief review of the existing literature related to the effectiveness of eWOM communications and offer an overview of the determinants of eWOM persuasiveness. This paper contributes to the existing eWOM literature by reviewing the existing studies on eWOM communications, identifying gaps in the current research and providing directions for future research. Keywords: Electronic word-of-mouth · eWOM · Persuasiveness · Literature review · Research gaps
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Introduction
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is one of the oldest and most important channels of infor‐ mation dispersion between people and is recognized as an important determinant of consumer purchase behavior. Nevertheless, traditional WOM communications are limited between network boundaries and become weaker over distance and time [1]. Development of the Internet and popularity of e-commerce have led to the growth of electronic WOM (eWOM). Even though eWOM may be less personal, mostly anon‐ ymous and happens between people with weak ties in comparison with traditional WOM, it is seen as a more powerful tool because it is credible, publicly available and has significant reach [2]. The influence of eWOM can affect attitude and purchase intention of consumers, and hence sales [3]. Therefore, eWOM communications have received much attention from scholars [1]. Even though many studies have been conducted on eWOM, a structured analysis of this research stream is still limited [3]. A review of previous literature is valuable because findings are spread across different disciplines and thus difficult to acquire a consolidated view on this topic [4]. A few attempts to assess the literature on eWOM communications have been done [3, 4]. However, these studies have not considered persuasiveness of eWOM in detail and how it is affected by social media. Hence, the objective of this paper is to provide a brief review of the exiting literature on © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 354–359, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_32
Persuasiveness of eWOM Communications
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persuasiveness of eWOM. This paper contributes to the existing literature, struc‐ turing and summarizing studies on eWOM communications, identifying existing gaps in the current research and providing directions for future studies. The collection of appropriate research papers commenced through exploration of suitable articles found via Web of Science and SCOPUS. For this purpose
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