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The Impact of Electronic Word-Of-Mouth Communication: A Literature Analysis and Integrative Model
The Impact of Electronic Word-Of-Mouth Communication: A Literature Analysis and Integrative Model
Department of Finance and Decision Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 4 September 2011
Received in revised form 2 May 2012
Accepted 23 June 2012
Available online 10 July 2012
Keywords:
Electronic wordofmouth
eWOM
Consumer purchase decision
Social communication
Literature analysis
Dual-process theory
Interpersonal inuence
a b s t r a c t
The notion of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication has received considerable attention in
both business and academic communities. Numerous studies have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of eWOM communication. The scope of published studies on the impact of eWOM communication is
large and fragmented and little effort has been made to integrate the ndings of prior studies and evaluate the
status of the research in this area. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of eWOM research. Building
upon our literature analysis, we used the social communication framework to summarize and classify
prior eWOM studies. We further identied key factors related to the major elements of the social communication literature and built an integrative framework explaining the impact of eWOM communication on consumer behavior. We believe that the framework will provide an important foundation for
future eWOM research work.
2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The rise of new media channels during the last few years has offered fertile ground for electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication. More and more consumers use Web 2.0 tools (e.g., online
discussion forums, consumer review sites, weblogs, social network
sites, etc.) to communicate their opinions and exchange product information [36]. This new form of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication can contain positive or negative statements made by potential,
actual, and former customers about a product or a company via the
Internet [40].
Industry research reports have shown that when making purchase
decisions, Internet users trust online reviews posted by unknown
consumers more than they trust traditional media [63]. In addition,
user-generated content in the form of online customer reviews was
found to signicantly inuence consumer purchasing decisions [12].
91% of respondents mentioned that they consult online reviews,
blogs, and other user-generated content before purchasing a new
product/service, 46% of which are then inuenced in the way they
to purchase. Froster [33] predicted that over 50% of total retail sales
will be affected by web (e.g., online reviews) by 2014.
eWOM has undoubtedly been a powerful marketing force. In recent years, we witnessed an explosion of literature focusing on the
effectiveness of eWOM communication [22,29,53]. However, the
scope of published studies on the impact of eWOM communication
is large and fragmented. It is difcult to draw meaningful conclusions
from these studies. In addition, researchers have adopted various research approaches for investigating the eWOM phenomenon, and
little has been done to integrate the ndings of prior studies
[18,19]. According to our review of prior research work, studies on the
impact of eWOM communication can be classied into two levels:
market-level analysis and individual-level analysis [55]. At the
market-level analysis, researchers focused on market-level parameters
(e.g., product sales). This line of investigation used objective panel data
(e.g., the rate and the valence of consumer reviews) extracted from the
websites or online product review platforms to examine the impact of
eWOM messages on product sales [14,20,22,24,27,29,79]. At the
individual-level analysis, researchers postulated eWOM as a process of
personal inuence, in which communications between a communicator
(sender) and a receiver can inuence consumer purchase decision
[21,65,78].
In this study, we rst identied individual-level eWOM studies
and summarized their corresponding theoretical foundations. We
then presented the social communication framework and classied
key factors of eWOM communication. We further proposed an integrative framework of the impact of eWOM communication on online
consumer behavior, and presented propositions concerning the relationships among the key elements of social communication.
462
The paper is structured as follows. First, we dene eWOM communication and compare the concept with traditional WOM communication. Second, we describe the research procedures and present a
quantitative summary of prior eWOM communication research.
Third, we present the results of paper classication based on the social communication literature. Finally, we propose an integrative
framework of the impact of eWOM communication and present a
set of propositions. We then conclude the paper by discussing the
implications of the research framework for further theoretical and
empirical investigations.
2. Electronic word-of-mouth communication
The power of interpersonal inuence through word-of-mouth
communication has been well recognized in the consumer literature
[2,41,52]. Prior studies have found that consumers perceive WOM as
more trustworthy and persuasive than traditional media, such as
print ads, personal selling, and radio and TV advertising. The inuence on purchase decision through WOM communication was further
extended with the advent of the Internet, which extended eWOM
communication to various additional virtual settings. On the internet,
consumers can post their opinions, comments and reviews of products
on weblogs (e.g. xanga.com), discussion forums (e.g. zapak.com), review websites (e.g. Epinions.com), e-bulletin board systems, newsgroups, and social networking sites (e.g. facebook.com) [17].
While eWOM communication has some characteristics in common with traditional WOM communication, it is different from traditional WOM in several dimensions. These dimensions all contribute
to the uniqueness of eWOM communication. First, unlike traditional
WOM, eWOM communications possess unprecedented scalability
and speed of diffusion. As with traditional WOM, sharing of information is between small groups of individuals in synchronous mode
[3,26,58,74]. Information in traditional WOM is usually exchanged
in private conversations or dialogs. It is therefore rather difcult to
pass along the information to any individual who is not present
when and where the information is exchanged. In contrast, eWOM
communications involve multi-way exchanges of information in
asynchronous mode [47]. Information in the form of eWOM does
not need to be exchanged at the same time when all communicators
are present [35,50]. For instance, users of forums are able to read and
post comments after the threads are created, not necessary at the
time when the threads are being created. Second, unlike traditional
WOM, eWOM communications are more persistent and accessible.
Most of the text-based information presented on the Internet is archived and thus would be made available for an indenite period of
time [40,47,56,64,67,70]. Third, eWOM communications are more
measurable than traditional WOM [56,65]. The presentation format,
quantity, and persistence of eWOM communications have made
them more observable. Word-of-mouth information available online
is far more voluminous in quantity compared to information
obtained from traditional contacts in the ofine world [13]. In
other words, researchers can easily retrieve a large number of
eWOM messages online and analyze their characteristics such as
the number of sentimental words used, position of the messages,
style of messages, and the like. A nal key difference is that traditional WOM emanates from a sender who is known to the receiver of the
information, thereby the credibility of the communicator and the
message is known to the receiver.
electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). We used two methods to identify relevant papers. First, we conducted a systematic electronic search
using a number of index databases, which were: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO), ABI/INFORM Global (ProQuest), Social Science Citation
Index (SSCI), Science Citation Index (SCI), PsycINFO, CSA Illumina, Education Resources Center, and Emerald. The research team did the search
based on keywords including electronic word-of-mouth, ewom,
online reviews, online recommendations, marketing buzz, and
online consumer reviews. Second, we reviewed four MIS journals
(Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Research, Journal of
Management Information Systems, and Management Information
Systems Quarterly) and three Marketing journals (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research) manually to ensure that no major eWOM articles were
ignored.
Following the guidelines of the conventional systematic review
methodology [75], inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to the
initial set of articles. These were done to ensure that the sample of articles used for analysis was appropriate for the current research. The inclusion criteria was the following: (1) publication was academic and
peer reviewed in nature; (2) eWOM was the main focus of investigation
in the paper; (3) researchers had a dened sample; (4) publication that
addressed impacts of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM); and (5) publication dealt with investigation of eWOM in business-to-consumer settings. The exclusion criteria were applied to: (1) papers with an entirely
conceptual or theoretical background and no research design; and (2)
publications that dealt with the investigation of eWOM in the form of
a recommendation agent (system agent). At the article analysis stage,
two authors independently reviewed and eliminated articles that
were not pertinent to the current focus.
A total of 47 eWOM communication articles published between
2000 and 2010 were identied. Research on the impact of eWOM
communication can be classied into market-level analysis and
individual-level analysis [55]. In this review, 47% (22 out of 47 articles) of the articles adopted the market-level approach, while 53%
(25 out of 47 articles) focused on the individual-level analysis (see
Fig. 1). As a number of researchers have already conducted a review
on prior studies of market-level eWOM communication [25,44,79],
we only focused on individual-level eWOM studies in the current
analysis.
4. Review of study ndings
4.1. Types of eWOM
The popularity of Web 2.0 has empowered consumers to inuence others through a variety of platforms to post user-generated
content (UGC) tools (e.g., blogs, microblogs, forums, chat rooms,
and social networking sites). Our literature review showed that a
majority of eWOM studies focused on online consumer reviews
made on e-commerce websites, discussion forums or rating sites
(see Table 1). Other forms of eWOM have received far less attention
12
10
10
7
6
Market (22)
4
2
0
Individual (25)
3
2
1
3
2
1
0
2001
1
0
2004
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Studies
zapak.com
[8,46,78]
Epinions.com,
shopping.com
[4,15,21,28,34,36,55,57,59,6466,71,74,77]
Xanga.com,
blogger.com
facebook.com,
MySpace.com
[23,57,69]
Amazon.com
[36,46,56,57,67,7173]
[69]
in academic research. Lee and Youn's [57] study was one of the few
research papers that focused on the effects of eWOM in the form of
a personal blog.
463
Table 2
Theoretical foundations of prior eWOM studies.
Theory
Studies
Dual-process theory
- Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
- HeuristicSystematic Model (HSM)
Interpersonal theory
- Persuasive
- Conformity
- Informational cascade
Attribution theory
Cognitive t theory
Impression formation literature
Negativity bias
Social presence theory
Social ties
Sociolinguistic theory
Source credibility literature
Trust literature
[21]
[15,23,36,56,64,65,67,73]
[36,78]
[21,46,64,66,77]
[66,67]
[45]
[57,71]
[65]
[46]
[21,57,64,71]
[54]
[74]
[4]
[8,21,23,46,57,67,71,72]
[4,59]
464
5.2. Stimuli
The stimulus refers to the message transmitted by the communicator. In the traditional word-of-mouth marketing literature, the valence
(positive, negative, or neutral) and the volume (the quantity of the information) have received a lot of attention. Particularly, researchers focused on the impact of extremely positive and extremely negative
WOM [3739]. Because of the nature of traditional WOM communication, most of these studies examined the impact of WOM messages by
manipulating WOM messages in an experimental setting. Some recent
eWOM studies also adopted this approach in examining the impact of
eWOM on consumers' purchasing intention [56,57,64,67]. Table 4 summarizes the factors related to the stimulus.
In eWOM communication studies, researchers considered valences
(e.g., positively framed eWOM vs. negatively framed eWOM) to be persuasive effects. Positively framed eWOM highlights the strengths of a
product/service and encourages people to adopt a product/service,
while negatively framed eWOM emphasizes the weaknesses/problems
of a product/service and thus discourages people to adopt them [27,29].
Past research in the area of consumer behavior has shown that consumers pay more attention to negative information than positive information. They also tend to weigh negative information more than
positive information during evaluation and decision making [41]. Similarly, Park and Lee [64] showed that negative eWOM has a stronger inuence on eWOM effect than positive eWOM. Researchers referred to
the differing effect of negatively and positively valenced events as negativity bias or negativity effect. Baumeister et al. [5] found that the principle of bad is stronger than good is consistent across a broad range of
phenomena, and suggested that people tend to react more strongly to
bad things as the adaptive response to their physical and social environment. Building on this line of literature, we believe that eWOM valence has a positive relationship with eWOM credibility [21].
P6. eWOM valence is positively associated with eWOM credibility.
In this review, we also notice that recommendation sidedness and
number of recommendations (volume) were the two most studied
stimulus cues in eWOM communication. A one-sided message presents either positive or negative valenced information. A two-sided
message includes both positively and negatively valenced information. Prior marketing literature [49] suggested that two-sided information enhances the completeness of information, and thus is
perceived to be more credible. Existing eWOM studies have also examined the relationship between sidedness of eWOM and eWOM
credibility [21,28]. Therefore, we believe that eWOM sidedness
has a positive inuence on eWOM credibility.
P7. eWOM sidedness is positively associated with eWOM credibility.
A considerable number of market-level studies have found that
the volume of reviews is signicantly associated with product sales
[25,29,60]. Most of these studies even showed that review ratings
are not associated with product sales, but that the number of reviews
Denitions
465
Table 4
Factors associated with the stimulus.
Studies
Constructs
Denitions
Studies
[23,28,56,57,71]
Argument quality
Relevance
Timeliness
Accuracy
Comprehensiveness
[4,15,21,23,56,67,73,78]
[65,66,72,77]
[15,21,60,64,74,78]
[15]
[4,60]
[8,28,46,54,57,64,65,67,73,77]
[36,46,69,72,74]
[34]
[36]
Recommendation
framing (valence)
[8]
[8]
Recommendation
sidedness (ratio of
positive message:
negative message)
[8]
Number of reviews
(volume)
Review type
Recommendation
rating
[36]
Recommendation
consistency
[54]
[54,59,77]
Review rate
Sales volume
[34,55,57,64,71,77]
[21,28,34,46,56]
[34,36,56,64,65,67,73]
[21]
[21]
[55]
[45]
[21,28,64]
[66]
[55]
[57]
[71]
466
Table 5
Factors associated with the communicator.
Denitions
Studies
Source credibility
Expertise
[15,21,78]
[15,72]
[15,23,72]
Source type
Attribution
Social tie
Homophily
5.4. Receivers
The receiver is the individual who responds to the communication.
The actual impact of the information received may vary from person
to person. The same content can engender very different responses in
different recipients [9], depending on the recipients' perceptions, experience, and sources. This has led researchers to gain interest in the information adoption process to understand the extent of informational
inuence on people's minds. In the information adoption literature,
Sussman and Siegal [75] found that the receivers' experience and
knowledge moderates both the central inuences (the nature of arguments in the message) and peripheral inuences (the subject matter
of the message) on information adoption in computer-mediated communication contexts. In the eWOM literature, consumers' characteristics, such as consumer expertise and involvement, also play an
important moderating role in determining the impact of eWOM
content (e.g., type and number of online consumer reviews) on purchase intention [28,65]. Researchers further investigated other factors
related to personal characteristics, such as gender, consumer skepticism, and cognitive personalization. Table 6 provides a summary of factors associated with the receiver.
Dual-process theory suggests that people who have the motivation
and ability are more likely to process information via the central route
[9,10,30]. In this literature analysis, we observed that researchers examined how receivers' characteristics affected the likelihood of elaboration and moderated the impact of eWOM messages on consumer
purchase decision. Among the 25 individual-level eWOM studies, involvement (motivation) and prior knowledge (expertise) are the two
most widely studied characteristics of the receivers [21,28,36,56,65,66].
As shown in Table 7, the receivers' characteristics are usually postulated
as moderators affecting both central and peripheral routes on consumer
purchase decisions.
Involvement refers to personal relevance or importance of a
product/service. A meta-analysis found that involvement is associated
Table 6
Factors associated with the receiver.
Constructs
Denitions
Prior knowledge
(of review
topic/
platform)
Conrmation
of prior
belief
Involvement
Constructs
Trustworthiness
Motivation
to process
information
Focused search
[45,54]
[57,71]
[74]
[74]
Gender
Product
preference
Consumer
skepticism
Cognitive
How people interpret events in a
personalization self-referential manner
Studies
[21]
[21,28,56,66,67]
[36]
[78]
[4]
[55]
[57,73]
[77]
with information processing [48]. Our review found that prior studies
have already empirically shown how involvement moderates the
eWOM effect in consumer decision process. For example, Lee et al.
[56] demonstrated that as involvement increases, the effect of negative eWOM is greater for high-quality eWOM than for low-quality
eWOM. Park and Lee [66] also found that for high involvement receivers, the perceived informativeness of an eWOM message has a
higher effect on purchasing intention than the perceived product
popularity. When individuals have higher involvement, they have
greater motivation to engage in effortful cognitive activity through
the central route. When individuals have lower involvement, they
467
tend to rely on peripheral cues during information processing. Therefore, in our integrative framework, consumer involvement exhibits a
moderating effect upon the relationship between eWOM quality and
information usefulness, as well as upon the relationship between
eWOM quality and purchase intention.
P12. Consumer involvement moderates the relationship between eWOM
quality and information usefulness.
P13. Consumer involvement moderates the relationship between eWOM
quality and purchase intention.
Table 7
Central vs. peripheral routes.
Authors (year)
Central/systematic
route
Peripheral/heuristic
route
Moderators
Relationships
Argument quality
Source credibility
NIL
Argument quality
Perceived blogger
trustworthiness
NIL
Amount of messages
Quality of negative
messages
Amount of negative
messages
Type of reviews
(attribute-centric
vs. benet-centric)
Number of reviews
Receiver characteristics
(expertise)
Perceived
informativeness
of reviews
Perceived product
popularity
Receiver characteristics
(involvement)
Quality
Quantity
Receiver characteristics
(involvement)
Quality
Quantity
Argument quality
Source credibility
Receiver characteristics
(skepticism)
Receiver characteristics
(disconrming
information,
focused search)
Source credibility
a
b
Signicant effect.
Insignicant effect.
Receiver characteristics
(involvement, prior
knowledge of
review topic, prior
knowledge
of platform)
Sender characteristics
(trustworthiness)
Receiver characteristics
(motivation to process
information)
Receiver characteristics
(involvement)
Receiver characteristics
(disconrming
information,
focused search)
468
and we also proposed an integrative framework for the study of the impact of eWOM communication.
The integrative framework is composed of ve essential components communicators, stimuli, receivers, responses and contextual
factors. As mentioned earlier, unlike traditional WOM communication,
eWOM communication possesses unprecedented speed of diffusion
and enables multi-directional exchanges of information between communicators and receivers. Thus, the contextual factor, namely the platform in which people exchange information, is what distinguishes
eWOM from traditional WOM. Due to the rapidly changing nature of
the Internet, the contextual factor the platform is expected to be
one of the most crucial factors impacting the eWOM adoption process
in the future. As Web 3.0 becomes the new generation of the World
Wide Web, information and most of the behaviors of users will be captured and stored in a huge database further enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and legibility of eWOM data. We expect that the migration of
Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 could facilitate eWOM communication and play a
more important role in inuencing consumer purchase decision.
6.2. Limitations
Some limitations should be noted. The results and analyses of this
study were limited to the pool of journals that satised our selection
criteria. For instance, we built our conceptual model on the social
communication literature and we did not include market-level studies. From our preliminary review of market-level studies, we noticed
that these studies adopted a very different theoretical research approach in examining the eWOM phenomenon. Future studies should
expand the literature analysis and the number of classied studies
based on different levels of analysis. Research on the impact of
eWOM communication is still emerging. Because of a limited number
of empirical studies, we were not able to perform a quantitative
meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is strongly recommended in the future, so as to improve our understanding of the relative impacts of
the three elements (communicators, receivers, and stimuli) on the responses to eWOM communication, and the moderating roles of the
contextual factors.
7. Conclusions
To conclude, this literature analysis provides an overview of the
current status of knowledge in the domain of eWOM communication
research. Furthermore, we present a conceptual framework, and
identify the key variables of each of the four elements in the social
communication. We believe that this study will stimulate future research on the impact of eWOM communication on consumer purchase decision by drawing attention to the variables and linkages
that need further investigation.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Editor of DSS and the two anonymous referees for the insightful comments. The authors also acknowledge
with gratitude the generous support of the Hong Kong Baptist University
for the projects (FRG1/09-10/054) and (FRG1/10-11/006) without which
the timely production of the current publication would not have been
feasible.
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Christy M.K. Cheung is Associate Professor at Hong Kong
Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. from City University
of Hong Kong. Her research interests include virtual community, knowledge management, social media, and IS adoption
and usage. Her research articles have been published in MIS
Quarterly, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, Journal of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology, and Journal of Information Technology.