• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.131-154
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• 2013

New internet technologies have created a revolutionary new platform which allows consumers to make decision about product price and quality quickly and provides information about themselves through the transcript of online reviews. By expressing their feelings toward products or services on virtual opinion platforms, users extend their influence into cyberspace as electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM). Existing research indicates that an impact of eWOM on the consumer decision process is influential. For both academic researchers and practitioners, investigating this phenomenon of information sharing in online website is essential given the increasing number of consumers using them as sources of purchase decisions. It is worthwhile to examine the extent to which opinion seekers are willing to accept and adopt online reviews and which factors encourage adoption. Discerning the most motivating aspects of information adoption in particular, could help electronic marketers better promote their brand and presence on the internet. The objectives of this study are to investigate how online WOM influences a persons' purchase decision by discovering which factors encourage information adoption. Especially focused on the self-efficacy, this research investigates how self-efficacy affects on information usefulness and adoption of online information. Although people are exposed to same review or comment about product or service, some accept the reviews while others do not. We notice that accepting online reviews mainly depends on the person's preference or personal characteristics. This study empirically examines this issue by using cognitive dissonance theory. Specifically, in the movie industry, we address few questions-is always positive WOM generating positive effect? What if the movie isn't the person's favorite genre? What if the person who is very self-assertive so doesn't take other's opinion easily? In these cases of cognitive dissonance, is always WOM generating same result? While many studies have focused on one direct of WOM which indicates positive (or negative) informative reviews or comments generate positive (or negative) results and more (or less) profits, this study investigates not only directional properties of WOM but also how people change their opinion towards product or service positive to negative, negative to positive through the online WOM. An experiment was conducted quantitatively by using a sample of 168 users who have experience within the online movie review site, 'Naver Movie'. Users were required to complete a survey regarding reviews and comments taken from the real movie page. The data reflected user's perceptions of online WOM information that determined users' adoption level. Analysis results provide empirical support for the proposed theoretical perspective. When user can't agree with the opinion of online WOM information, in other words, when cognitive dissonance between online WOM information and users' preference occurs, perceived self-efficacy significantly decreases customers' perception of usefulness. And this perception of usefulness plays an important role in determining users' intention to adopt online WOM information. Most of researches have been concentrated on characteristics of online WOM itself such as quality or vividness of information, credibility of source and direction of online WOM, etc. for describing effect of online WOM, but our results suggest that users' personal character (e.g., self-efficacy) plays decisive role for acceptance of online WOM information. Higher self-efficacy means lower possibility to accept the information that represents counter opinion because of cognitive dissonance, whereas the people that have lower self-efficacy are willing to accept the online WOM information as true and refer to purchase decision. This study suggests a model for understanding role of direction of online WOM information. Also, our result implicates the importance of online review supervision and personalized information service by confirming switching opinion negative to positive is more difficult than positive to negative through the online WOM information. This implication would help marketers to manage online reviews of their products or services.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.151-163
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• 2018

Today, the development of internet brings many changes in formation exploration and acceptance. Not only the customers can come into contact much information about the firm and its product by quick and easy search, but also they produce information by themselves or can spread the information via the internet. Nowadays, customers are progressive information explorer and producer on online. In this sense, this study examined the effects of e-word-of-mouth information characteristics on the consumer's perceived usefulness and perceived acceptance of e-word-of-mouth information in the food service industry in order to suggest directions to enhances marketing strategies for marketer. The research model for this study was designed based on the hypothesis that the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information and credibility of the information influenced both the user's perceived usefulness and acceptance. Based on total 277 customers obtained from the empirical research, this study reviewed validity, reliability and fitness of research model. The analysis results on these factors are as follow. First, the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information; vividness, consensus, direction had an influence on the customer's perceived usefulness. Second, the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information; vividness, consensus, direction had an influence on the customer's perceived acceptance. Third, the reliability of information had an influence on the customer's perceived usefulness and the credibility of e-word-of-mouth information perceived acceptance. Fourth, the customer's perceived usefulness had an influence on the customer's perceived acceptance.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.133-146
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• 2013

While the use of internet is routine nowadays, users receive and share information through a variety of media. Through the use of internet, information delivery media is diversifying from traditional media of one-way communication, such as newspaper, TV, and radio, into media of two-way communication. In contrast of traditional media, blogs enable individuals to directly upload and share news, which can be considered to have a differential speed of information diffusion than news media that convey information unilaterally. Therefore this Study focused on the difference between online news and social media blogs. Moreover, there are variations in the speed of information diffusion because that information closely related to one person boosts communications between individuals. We believe that users' standard of evaluation would change based on the types of information. As well, the speed of information diffusion would change based on the level of proximity. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the differences in information diffusion based on the types of media. And then information is segmentalized and an examination is done to see how information diffusion differentiates based on the types of information. This study used the Bass diffusion model, which has been frequently used because this model has higher explanatory power than other models by explaining diffusion of market through innovation effect and imitation effect. Also this model has been applied a lot in other information diffusion related studies. The Bass diffusion model includes an innovation effect and an imitation effect. Innovation effect measures the early-stage impact, while the imitation effect measures the impact of word of mouth at the later stage. According to Mahajan et al. (2000), Innovation effect is emphasized by usefulness and ease-of-use, as well Imitation effect is emphasized by subjective norm and word-of-mouth. Also, according to Lee et al. (2011), Innovation effect is emphasized by mass communication. According to Moore and Benbasat (1996), Innovation effect is emphasized by relative advantage. Because Imitation effect is adopted by within-group influences and Innovation effects is adopted by product's or service's innovation. Therefore, ours study compared online news and social media blogs to examine the differences between media. We also choose different types of information including entertainment related information "Psy Gentelman", Current affair news "Earthquake in Sichuan, China", and product related information "Galaxy S4" in order to examine the variations on information diffusion. We considered that users' information proximity alters based on the types of information. Hence, we chose the three types of information mentioned above, which have different level of proximity from users' standpoint, in order to examine the flow of information diffusion. The first conclusion of this study is that different media has similar effect on information diffusion, even the types of media of information provider are different. Information diffusion has only been distinguished by a disparity between proximity of information. Second, information diffusions differ based on types of information. From the standpoint of users, product and entertainment related information has high imitation effect because of word of mouth. On the other hand, imitation effect dominates innovation effect on Current affair news. From the results of this study, the flow changes of information diffusion is examined and be applied to practical use. This study has some limitations, and those limitations would be able to provide opportunities and suggestions for future research. Presenting the difference of Information diffusion according to media and proximity has difficulties for generalization of theory due to small sample size. Therefore, if further studies adopt to a request for an increase of sample size and media diversity, difference of the information diffusion according to media type and information proximity could be understood more detailed.