Credibility in E-WOM
How review perceptions impact their
persuasiveness
Natalie Van Hemelen (KULeuven), Peeter W. J. Verlegh (UVA) & Tim Smits (KULeuven)
Theoretical background: Introduction
• With the advent of social media, E-WOM and online
consumer reviews became increasingly popular
• Online consumer reviews
o
“Online recommendations about products, services,
organizations or brands, based on consumers’ personal
experiences”
o
E.g., Yelp
Succes and impact of online review sites
• People attach a lot of importance to the non-commercial
opinion of social others (Fong & Burton, 2004)
• Online reviews (often) perceived as impartial
People are less suspicious about their credibility
o 72% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
o 58% trust products that have positive online reviews
Reviews have a strong persuasive impact on persons’ attitudes
But impact depends on a lot of factors: valence, credebility recommendation
source, etc.
Valence and perceived credibility
• Debate: Positive OR negative reviews most impactful?
o
Psychology & Consumer research: Negative information
stronger impact because it is perceived as more diagnostic
>< But many studies found the opposite: Positive E-WOM more
impactful than negative...
• Floh and collegeaus (2009): many researchers only take perceived
valence into account (see also Sussan et al., 2006; Willemsen et al.,
2012)
Valence and perceived credibility
• Review’s valence and credibilty cannot be assumed to be
independent from each other...
Current study: Combined persuasive impact of perceived
valence and credibility
Hypotheses (1)
• Given the previous, we predict that valence and credibility will both
have an effect on the receiver’s product attitude
• Valence: Straightforward effect
H1: Positive reviews (vs negative ones) will increase the
attitude towards the product
• Credibility: Moderated effect
H2a: For positive reviews, higher credibility will increase
the attitude towards the product
H2b: For negative reviews, higher credibility will decrease
the attitude towards the product
Hypotheses (2)
• But, valence is also likely to affect credibility...
• Rationale: Negative information  Attention  Source questioning
• H3: Positive reviews (vs negative ones) wil increase the
review’s perceived credibility
Moderated mediation model
*Type 1 Model as outlined by Preacher, Rucker & Hayes (2007)
Method (1)
• Procedure & participants
o
Between subjects design with 2 conditions (positive vs negative
review)
o
89 Bachelor students of a Flemish University College
• 62 men (69,7%), 27 women (30,3%)
• Between 18 and 24 years old (M = 19,22; SD = 1,81)
• Visit regularly a restaurant (M = 4,71, SD = 1,189)
o
Online study
•
•
•
•
Read one of the 2 reviews
Different questions to assess their attitudes
Instruction to write a review themselves about the restaurant
Afterwards 3 raters coded the reviews
Method (2)
• Stimuli
Method (3)
• Measures
o
Attitude restaurant
• 10 (7-point) bipolar rating scales: qualitative – not qualitative,
creative – uncreative, attractive – unattractive,…
• Total attitude score: mean of the scores on the 10 rating scales
(Cronbach’s α = .953, M = 41.287, SD = 10.959)
o
Credibility review
• 4 (7-point) bipolar rating scales: honest – dishonest,
credible – incredible,…
• Total credibility score: mean of the scores on the 4 rating scales
• (Cronbach’s α = .687, M = 3.862, SD = 1.645)
Results
• Proposed model confirmed!
*Bootstrapping Macro SPSS (model 74), Hayes et al. (5000 samples)
Hypothesis 1
Valence review
b = 1.511, p < .001
Attitude
restaurant
Hypotheses 2a & 2b
* p < .001
Hypothesis 3
Moderated mediation model
b = 1.511*
(b = -1.318*)
*p < .001
Future research
• In our study the findings only hold for one type of reviews
o
In a follow-up study, we want to test whether the findings also
hold for other types of reviews, products,...
• Future research can further investigate why negative reviews
are exactly perceived as less credible than positive ones
Thank you for your attention!