The Customer is not Always Right? A Study on the Trustworthiness of Ewom Senders
Meyer, Anton Feigl, Kathrin
Meyer, Anton
Feigl, Kathrin
Publication Type
Book Chapter
Editor
Supervisor
Publication Year
2017
Journal
Book
The Customer is NOT Always Right? Marketing Orientationsin a Dynamic Business World
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Publication Begin page
835
Publication End page
835
Publication Number of pages
Collections
Abstract
Since the increasing importance of the Internet, consumer interactions have been moving from offline to online, from personal to stranger interactions. Thus the shift of traditional word-of-mouth to the web comes with new challenges for companies and consumers. Seekers of electronic word-of-mouth – as opposed to traditional word-of-mouth – only have limited information on the sender of the message and hence have to derive the value of the message and trustworthiness of the sender from cues available in the written text. Inspite of an increasing amount of empirical research on (electronic) word- of-mouth so far, research lacks of investigating how consumers communicate and how this communication style influences the receiver.We conducted a 2x2x2 online experiment with 768 participants, in order to investigate the effects of the communication style applied by the sender, as well as the motives of the sender, on the sender’s trustworthiness and purchase intention of the receiver, in consumer online reviews. Results show that an informational review has a higher effect on purchase intention than an emotional review. Furthermore, we found a moderating effect of the perceived motive on the sender’s trustworthiness.
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
35 Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services, 3503 Business Systems In Context, 3506 Marketing, 46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4609 Information Systems