eCommerce platforms increasingly allow consumers to post their reviews using both text and images. However, most research focuses on text-only reviews, widening the gap between what happens in industry and academic research. Our understanding of multimodal reviews and their impact mechanism on consumer decisions remain unclear. Drawing on multimodal literature in communication, we first explain what multimodal reviews are and further classify them into denotative types (DT) and connotative types (CT). Next, we use the rhetorical theory to explain how reviews influence consumers’ purchase intention. We will conduct a set of experiments and explicitly measure the three rhetoric appeals (pathos, logos, ethos) for each type of review. Our approach allows us to quantify and compare the strength of each appeal, unambiguously showing the causal relationship between reviews and consumers’ purchase intention. Our study results will inform whether platform managers should implement multimodal reviews (text and image)
