Consumer Adoption of Mobile eWOM Messages

Introduction

In marketing and consumer studies, word of mouth (WOM) is one of the most fascinating topics for scholars and practitioners. WOM is defined as oral, person-to-person communication between a communicator and a recipient who perceives the respective message as non-commercial although the subject is a brand, product, or service (Arndt, 1967, p. 3). Previous studies on WOM have found that WOM has a great impact on consumers’ attitude formation, purchase decisions, and even post-usage perceptions of a product/service (e.g., Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Brown & Reingen, 1987; Herr, Kardes, & Kim, 1991; Bone, 1995).

Since the early 1990s, with the advent of the Internet, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has become increasingly important (Bickart & Schindker, 2001; Godes & Mayzlin, 2004). Consumers increasingly communicate product information to other consumers via new media such as e-mail, community sites, review sites, social networking sites, blogs, online discussion forums, and news groups (e.g., Goldsmith, 2006; Okazaki, 2008). Many scholars have found that such eWOM messages have a great impact on consumers’ purchase decision making (Chung, Lee, & Rabjon, 2008; Park & Kim, 2008; Schlosser, 2011; Sen & Lerman, 2007).

With the rapid growth of mobile phone ownership, an increasing number of consumers can send and receive product information through their wireless messaging service on their mobile phones (cf. Shen, Wang, & Xiang, 2013). Communication via mobile phones in the form of e-mail, SMS, and text messages via mobile Internet access has the unique characteristic of ubiquitous connectivity, which enables consumers to exchange information anytime and anywhere (Lee, 2005; Okazaki, 2008). As a result, mobile-based electronic word of mouth (mWOM) has been regarded as an important mobile marketing tool to offer consumers context-sensitivity and time-critical recommendations (Okazaki, 2009).

As the growing importance of mWOM has been recognized, mobile viral marketing has become more popular. Mobile viral marketing is defined as the distribution or communication that relies on consumers to transmit content via mobile communication techniques and mobile devices to other potential consumers in their social sphere and to animate these contacts to also transmit the content (Wiedemann, 2007, p. 53). Because mobile viral messages from friends and relatives might be perceived to be more credible than marketer-generated promotional messages via mobile phones (Wiedemann, Haunstetter, & Pousttchi, 2008), more marketing practitioners are starting to utilize mobile-based viral marketing and, in turn, marketing scholars are starting to investigate mWOM message senders and recipients in the context of viral marketing.

Because pioneers in mWOM research focused on viral marketing, a number of scholars have shed light on how recipients of mobile viral messages from marketers via friends and relatives evaluate and use the messages (Okazaki, 2008; Wiedemann, Palka, & Pousttchi, 2008; Palka, Pousttchi, & Wiedemann, 2009; Pescher, 2014). Other scholars, following the research on non-mobile eWOM, have focussed on how recipients of anonymous mWOM message senders evaluate and adopt the reviews (Shen, et al., 2013; Wang, Shen, & Sun, 2013).