Internet Wom’s Influence On Consumers’ Online Behavior

With the fast development of the Internet and the emergence of online social networks, consumer word of mouth plays a much more important role in our society and in the process of consumer buying. Compared with traditional word of mouth(WOM), online word of mouth is richer in forms, spreads broader and faster, and also has the characteristics of anonymity. In this Internet society, how will online WOM give an impact on consumers? The purpose of this study is to find the relationship between consumer online behavior and online WOM with the data from real world, and provide marketing managers with practical advice. Dianping.com is the most influential and popular online review platform in China, and this study is based on the actual operation data from dianping.com through data mining and data analysis methods.By grabbing massive data from the internet, this paper uses online WOM of 10,461 restaurants from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and this is a large sample size. Firstly, this study found that the volume of consumers online WOM has a positive effect on consumers’ page view and add-favorites behavior, but its impact on consumers’check-in behavior is not significant. That is to say, the increase of online WOM’s volume will raise consumers’ awareness, but does not have a significant persuasive effect. Secondly, Online WOM’s valence has a significant impact on consumers’online behavior. In particular, the higher the valence is, the larger the shop’s page view is, and the larger the shop’s check-in volume is. Thirdly, Negative online WOM can also affect consumers’behavior of actual consumption. That is, the higher the proportion of the negative reviews is, the lower the real number of guests coming to the store is. However, the proportion of negative reviews does not have a significant impact on page views and check-in number, proving once again that negative online WOM reduces customers’perceived value of the product, and thereby affecting consumers’decision-making. This also confirms why manufacturers will make great efforts to deal with the negative word of mouth. Fourthly, the role of price is also taken into consideration. For consumers, the price has both positive and negative effects. Lower price is considered to be one of the most important motivations why consumers want to buy. Because lower price means that consumers can try with a lower cost. Meanwhile, the price is also a reflection of the quality. The higher the price is, the better quality the consumer feels, which also promotes consumer to buy. So, either the price is too high or too low, consumers’ risk will increase. However, with the increase in consumers’ perceived risk, consumers would like to get information from word of mouth to help to make decisions.This study provides marketing practitioners with practical managerial implications. Because of this, marketing practitioners should be noted that online word of mouth has multiple attributes:the volume of word of mouth, the valence of word of mouth potency, the proportion of negative word of mouth, the proportion of positive word of mouth and so on. If companies desire to have great reputation and performance, various attributes of online word of mouth should be observed and balanced at the meantime.