Does Online Social Influence Matter In Consumer Purchase Decisions At Agricultural Product Harm Crisis Review Cognition?

At the face of world economic crises and the significant fluctuations in the economic growth of individual countries, there is an increasing trend among firms to do less costly production. Sometimes such productions might be harmful to the consumers and subsequently emanate product harm crises (PHCs). As a consequence of getting everyday news broke about such type of hazards, there is deterioration in safety perceptions about products among consumers. The effects of PHC are detrimental to the brand, the firm, and to the industry during the crisis recovery period. The consumers may also face challenges when they are making purchase decisions. The Internet makes significant impact on the life style of people in the present day context and the information is no longer a scarce resource in the market economy. During a PHC, not only browsing the websites like Baidu.com or Google.com, but also the weblogs and social media like Sina Weibo, Twitter and Facebook are facilitating the consumers to seek experts’ opinions about the culpable brand. Moreover, the individuals can make criticisms via the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication channels in the form of review, rate, and recommendations to multitude of audience at low physical and psychological cost. The reviewed literature shows that the online social persuasion through eWOM communication makes significant effect on the consumer decision-making behavior. However, none of previous studies have discussed about the use of eWOM communication as a crisis response strategy and the effects of such communication on consumer purchasing decisions at agricultural product harm crises.Based on the motivation to fulfill the aforementioned literature gap, the attributional antecedents of motivations, information, and prior beliefs of the Attribution theory have applied to discuss the effects of eWOM messages on consumer purchasing decisions at PHC. Specifically, this research aims at exploring three research questions; (1) How do motivation, ability level, and opportunity of a consumer influence his/her adoption of eWOM messages to assess the post-purchase perceived risk of a culpable brand?, (2) How does the credibility of messages that are available in social media affect a consumer’s post-purchase perceive risk assessment of a culpable brand?, and (3) How does a firm’s crisis response that is available in different eWOM communication channels affect a consumer’s credibility evaluation of a culpable brand?, as three separate studies in Chinese and Sri Lankan contexts. Survey method is followed to collect data using questionnaires and three sets of consumer samples have identified randomly in each country setting. A fictitious product harm crisis scenario and fictitious eWOM messages have adopted from the literature and reputed e-opinion websites respectively to introduce the study problem through the questionnaire. Although the designing of questionnaires for study one and two is the same,3 (Web-based communication:proactive, reactive, and non available) X 2(Communication channel:consumer-generated vs. brand-generated) factorial design has used for study three. The hypotheses have tested using multiple regression, SEM, and ANCOVA statistical analysis methods.The results of the study one reveal that the motivation, opportunity, and ability level to elaborate eWOM messages have significant impact on the adoption of eWOM messages for both Chinese and Sri Lankan consumers in assessing the post-purchase perceived risk of a culpable brand. In study two, it reveals that although the ’source credibility’, ’argument quality’,’recommendation consistency’, and ’recommendation rating’ make significant effects on deciding the credibility of eWOM messages in social media for Chinese consumers, only the’argument quality’ and ’recommendation rating’ are significant for Sri Lankan consumers. Then, the results of study three reveal that the proactive communication strategy is effective in brand-generated channels and the reactive strategy is effective in consumer-generated channels for Chinese consumers to decide the credibility of the brand during the post-crisis period. However, the reactive strategy is preferred by Sri Lankan consumers irrespective of the eWOM channel difference. Pre-decisional disposition of the brand has showed a significant moderation effect in all the relationships of three research models. Finally, the study implications, limitations and future research directions have discussed.