Study On The EWOM Impact: A Mediating Role Of Trust And Consumer Perceived Value

Before the fifties of last century, the United States spread of Katz and Lazarsfeld, word of mouth communication was more powerful than other method. The updated authoritative statistics by McKinsey Company also shows that two-thirds of business drove by word of mouth. All of these show that word of mouth has the incomparable advantages to increase sales. With the development of internet technology and virtual community, there's a mass of information to be diffuse every day in network environment. Internet/Online/Electronic word of mouth permeates every corner of the internet, and just the power of the eWOM to reduce consumer search costs and uncertainty or risks made the research come into the vision of academy and industry.This study is focus on this new topic of eWOM, especially this kind of word of mouth diffused in the virtual community and some electronic commercial websites. An integrated proposed model is developed based on the Technology Acceptance Model of the perceive factor, trust and consumer perceived value, persuasive theory of the three key factors of source\information and receiver, along with thirty one hypotheses.Firstly, the research model was proposed based on much literature research and interview information, then the pretest of reliability and validity analysis was held to form the formal scale and questionnaire, lastly a web survey collected 416 valid samples was conducted to test hypotheses empirically. The main conclusions are summed up as follow:1. This proposed research model is suit for explaining the impact of eWOM to the consumer purchase intention. More specifically, the model is more powerful for low involvement consumers.2. This study confirmed the effect of information characteristics on the impact of eWOM on consumer purchase intention, they promoted consumer to trust word of mouth, and showed direct and significant effect on the eWOM impact. While the factors of the source dimension, such as expertise and the credibility of the source, the homophiles and reputation of website were proved no direct significant effect to the eWOM impact though they were proved to be the key factors of trust. 3.The study also found the influence of the receivers perception on the eWOM impact. The coherence of the brand image and self image perceived by the consumer directly influence the effect of eWOM impact. Meanwhile, social identity indicator did have an effect on eWOM impact.4. The results confirmed that trust critically mediates the effect of information characteristics on eWOM impact. The three factors of the source dimension and the significance hint of the information, as well as perceived social identity proved to be significant and positive effect on eWOM impact.5. Consumer perceived value fully mediated the effects of perceived coherence of the brand image and self image and perceived social identity on eWOM impact.6. This study attempted to investigate the moderating effect of consumer types on the Effect of eWOM impact. The results confirmed the low involvement consumer will look at coherence of the brand image and self image as the periphery clue to evaluate the value of the product, so that to decided whether buy or not. However, consumer product involvement took no moderating role in the effects of information characteristic and social identity indicator on the eWOM impact.This study explores relationships among several factors that may influence the effect of eWOM to enlarge the research area of interpersonal communication in the internet enviroments. The proposed model should be benefit to understand the eWOM impact systematically. Meanwhile, this study can help the corporation build virtual community, focus on consumer perceived value, adjust the integrated marketing communication according to the value needed by consumer.