Effects of Platform and Message Appeal on E-WOM Adoption: A Moderating Role of Product Type

• Main Authors: CHANG, YU-SHAN, 張瑜珊
• Other Authors: CHANG, JUNG-TING
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y6tu8k

碩士 === 東海大學 === 企業管理學系碩士班 === 105 === With the growth of e-commerce, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) has become important source to help customer make purchase decision. This study investigates the effect of message appeal (rational vs. emotional) and e-WOM on platform (marketer-developed platform vs. social media platform) on consumers’ perception of reviews. Additionally, this study conducts product type (search vs. experience) as a moderator to examine the relationships between message appeal and information usefulness, as well as between e-WOM on platform and e-WOM credibility. The experiment of this study conducted a questionnaire with eight scenarios and a total of 305 responses were collected to test the hypotheses. The result confirms that information usefulness and e-WOM credibility have positive effect on e-WOM adoption. Furthermore, rational appeal has greater effect on information usefulness than emotional appeal. With search products, e-WOM on marketer-developed platform indicates a better e-WOM credibility than on social media platform; no significant difference is found when the product type is experience product, however, the effect was greater when e-WOM was on social media platform. We also found that conducted ration appeal on marketer-developed platform had greater effect than conducted emotional appeal; the effect was in contract when the review was on social media platform. Based on these findings, theoretical and practical implications were discussed.