A Study of Factors Affecting the Credibility of Sponsored Posts Created by Instagram Influencers

This study examined how source expertise, objective information about product ingredients and benefits, review length, and the use of promotional language influence the perceived credibility of a sponsored review post for skincare products. This study carried out 4 in-depth interviews and online survey to 106 millennials living in the U.S. Results indicated that subjective comments about a reviewer’s personal experiences had a higher level of perceived credibility of a review post than objective information about product ingredients and benefits. With regard to source expertise, a sponsored review post written by an influencer with higher expertise was perceived as more reliable than a review post written by an influencer with lower expertise. This study also found that a lengthy post had a more positive effect on the perceived credibility of a post than a short post. Promotional language had a negative effect on the reliability of a post. A sponsored review post without a promotional message was evaluated more positively in terms trustworthiness than a post including promotional language

Recommendation and Sentiment Analysis Based on Consumer Review and Rating

Accurate analysis and recommendation on products based on online reviews and rating data play an important role in precisely targeting suitable consumer segmentations and therefore can promote merchandise sales. This study uses a recommendation and sentiment classification model for analyzing the data of beer product based on online beer reviews and rating dataset of beer products and uses them to improve the recommendation performance of the recommendation model for different customer needs. Among them, the beer recommendation is based on rating data; 10 classification models are compared in text sentiment analysis, including the conventional machine learning models and deep learning models. Combining the two analyses can increase the credibility of the recommended beer and help increase beer sales. The experiment proves that this method can filter the products with more negative reviews in the recommendation algorithm and improve user acceptance

Expressions of doubt and trust in online user reviews

How do expressions of doubt affect trust in online reviews? Some previous studies find that people trust confident advisors more than doubtful advisors, whereas others find doubtful advisors are trusted more. We tested the effects of expressing doubt using Yelp data and in a controlled experiment: In Study 1, reviews from Yelp (N = 5.9 million) were coded using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software. Reviews with doubtful language were seen as more useful, and this result was robust when controlling for other psychological and linguistic variables. In Study 2, participants (N = 660) evaluated reviews with doubtful or confident conclusions; doubtful reviews were seen as more likely to be written by actual consumers. In both studies, the positive effects of doubt were stronger for positive (vs. negative) reviews, suggesting doubt mitigates concerns about fake positive reviews. The present study emphasizes the advantages of expressing doubt

Functionality and usability features of ubiquitous mobile technologies : the acceptance of interactive travel apps

Purpose: Customers are increasingly utilizing mobile applications (apps) to compare prices of travel and hospitality services and to purchase their itineraries, tours and stays. This study explores key factors influencing the individuals’ perceptions about the usefulness of travel apps and sheds light on the causal paths predicting the individuals’ dispositions to utilize them.Design/methodology/approach: Quantitative data was gathered from 1,320 subscribers of social media groups. They were analyzed through a composite-based partial least squares (PLS) approach.Findings: The results indicate that information quality, source credibility and the functionality of travel apps are significantly affecting the individuals’ perceptions about their usefulness as well as their intentions to use them. They also confirm that there are highly significant indirect effects within the proposed model.Practical implications: This study suggests that there is scope for the travel service providers to enhance the quality and functionality of their mobile apps, in order to improve their consumers’ perceptions about the utility of these ubiquitous service technologies.Theoretical implications: The study integrates information quality and source credibility factors with a functionality construct. It examines their effects on the technology acceptance model (TAM)’s perceived usefulness and behavioral intentions.Theoretical implications: The study integrates information quality and source credibility factors with a functionality construct. It examines their effects on the technology acceptance model (TAM)’s perceived usefulness and behavioral intentions.Originality: This contribution incorporates a functionality construct in an information technology adoption model to shed light on the individuals’ dispositions to avail themselves of online content and/or to adopt interactive innovations. In this case, it implies that certain functionality features of travel apps including their responsiveness and technical capabilities can trigger users to increase their engagement with these mobile technologies on a habitual basis.peer-reviewe

The effect of characteristics of source credibility on consumer behaviour: a meta-analysis

YesThe aim of this research is to synthesise findings from existing studies on the characteristics of source credibility of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communications in a single model by using meta-analysis. Findings from 20 research papers show that source expertise, trustworthiness, and homophily significantly influence perceived eWOM usefulness and credibility, intention to purchase, and information adoption. The results of this study add to existing knowledge of the influence of source characteristics on consumer behaviour, which will advance our understanding of information processing. Marketers can use the findings of this meta-analysis to enhance their marketing activities

Utilitarian motivations to engage with travel websites : an interactive technology adoption model

Purpose: This study aims to investigate perceptions about interactive travel websites. The researchers hypothesize that engaging content, the quality of information and source credibility has a significant effect on the consumers’ utilitarian motivations to continue using them in the future.Design/methodology/approach: A structured survey questionnaire was used to gather data from 1,287 online users, who were members of two popular social media groups. The methodology relied on a partial least squares (PLS) approach to analyze the causal relationships within an extended information adoption model.Findings: The findings reveal that the research participants perceive the utility of interactive travel websites and are willing to continue using them, particularly the responsive ones. The research participants suggest that these sites are easy-to-use, capture their attention, and offer them useful information on various tourism services. The results also indicate that they appreciate their source credibility (in terms of their trustworthiness and expertise of their curators) as well as their quality content.Research limitations/Implications: This study integrates key measures from the information adoption model (IAM) with a perceived interactivity construct, to better understand the individuals’ acceptance and use of interactive websites.Practical implications: This research implies that service businesses ought to have engaging websites that respond to consumer queries, in a timely manner. Hence, they should offer a seamless experience to their visitors to encourage loyal behaviors and revisit intentions to their online domains.Originality: To the best of our knowledge, there are no other studies that incorporated an interactive engagement construct with key constructs from IAM and from the technology acceptance model (TAM). This contribution underlines the importance of measuring the individuals’ perceptions about the engagement capabilities of interactive media when investigating information and/or technology adoption.peer-reviewe

Online fashion shopping paradox: the role of customer reviews and facebook marketing

The paper aims to investigate the relevance of social media marketing, particularly customer reviews and Facebook pages in online fashion shopping. This qualitative study adopts Personal Construct Theory and employs the repertory grid to investigate the question: ‘how do online fashion shoppers construct the relevance of social media marketing activities in their online shopping experience? Analysis of 25 repertory grid interviews reveal insights that challenge current understanding of the role and relevance of customer reviews and Facebook pages in online fashion shopping. The research contributes novel insights into the rising desire of individuality and the increasing lack of sociality on social media

Is Negative E-WOM more powerful? Multimodal data analysis on air passengers’ perception of COVID safety measures

During the normalization stage of the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control, the safety threats caused by improper epidemic prevention measures of airlines have become the primary concern for air passengers. Negative e-WOM related to safety perception obtained based on online multimodal reviews of travel websites has become an important decision-making basis for potential air passengers when making airline choices. This study aims to examine the relationship between potential air passengers’ negative safety perception and the usefulness of online reviews, as well as to test the moderating effect of review modality and airline type. It also further explores the effectiveness and feasibility of applying big data sentiment analysis to e-WOM management. To this end, the theoretical model of negative safety perception, review modality, and airline type affecting review usefulness was constructed. Then we select 10 low-cost airlines and 10 full-service airlines, respectively, according to the number of reviews sorted by the TripAdvisor website, and use crawling techniques to obtain 10,485 reviews related to COVID-19 safety of the above companies from December 2019 to date, and conduct safety perception sentiment analysis based on Python’s Textblob library. Finally, to avoid data overdispersion, the model is empirically analyzed by negative binomial regression using R software. The results indicate that (1) Negative safety perception significantly and negatively affects review usefulness, that is, extreme negative safety perception can provide higher review usefulness for potential air passengers. (2) Review modality and airline type have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between negative safety perception and review usefulness, in which multimodal reviews and full-service airlines both weakened the negative impact of negative safety perception on review usefulness. The theoretical model in this paper is both an extension of the application of big data sentiment analysis techniques and a beneficial supplement to current research findings of e-WOM, providing an important reference for potential air passengers to identify useful reviews accurately and thus reduce safety risks in online decision-making