How Will Electronic Word of Mouth Affect Consumer Purchase Intention?

Introduction

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is one of the ways for consumer internal communication about products and services. It also is one of the most influential sources of market information for consumer (Mohtasham et al., 2017; Nguyen et al., 2020). The reason why WOM has important influence is because consumers trust other consumers more than advertisers or marketers (Sen and Lerman, 2007; Yusuf and Busalim, 2018). WOM also has an important influence when consumers make product purchase intentions and decision-making (Ameri et al., 2019; Paley et al., 2019).

When there is a highly developed social network system, consumers share their experience of products or services more easily. Consumer reviews play an important role in online shopping decisions, and most consumers claim that they read customer reviews before making a purchase decision (Filieri et al., 2018; Manes and Tchetchik, 2018). So the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) becomes more important (Pereira et al., 2017). Although similar to the traditional form, eWOM has several unique characters. eWOM often occurs between people who have little or no prior relationship with one another (e.g. strangers or fellow consumers) and can be anonymous (Pyle et al., 2021; Sen and Lerman, 2007). This anonymity allows consumers to more comfortably share their opinions without revealing their identities (Goldsmith and Horowitz, 2006). The unique character of eWOM can make it difficult for consumer to determine the quality and credibility of the eWOM (Chatterjee, 2001; Schindler and Bickart, 2005). Determining the quality of online posts has become even more difficult now that marketers have attempted to influence eWOM (Chatterjee, 2001; Bulut and Karabulut, 2018). Because of this, consumers often look for a variety of clues when determining the quality of the online information (Ladhari et al., 2019).

In previous studies on eWOM, most focus on quantitative of eWOM, such as the number of WOM (Abrantes et al., 2013; Hu and Kim, 2018; Yang et al., 2018) and the order effect (Hong and Pittman, 2020; Nam et al., 2020; Sohaib et al., 2019). This study focuses on qualitative of eWOM to examine the impact of language and product attitude on purchase intention.

Few studies paid attention on the nature of the eWOM language description. In the traditional WOM, consumers can identify the authenticity of WOM by intonation and body language, etc. However, consumers only received the language descriptions. Therefore, what kind of language is used becomes more important for eWOM, such as abstraction or specific description. Previous studies founded that eWOM receivers could infer senders’ standpoint by their language abstraction (Gaby et al., 2010). When consumers infer the opinions of senders, there are impacts on consumers’ opinions. This research focuses on the language abstraction regarding how to influence the consumer credibility and purchase intention.

Consumer product attitude is also an important resource for the adaptability of eWOM. Previous studies indicated that the consumer product attitudes would be influenced by eWOM (Bilal et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2018). And consumer product attitude will increase with the credibility increases (Alharthey, 2020; Bickart and Schindler, 2001). On the other hand, product attitudes influencing consumer credibility is an interesting problem. This study aims to know the relationships among product attitude, credibility and purchase intention.