Study On The Influence Of Information Characteristics And Tie Strength On Positive EWOM Ineffectiveness

With the popularity of social networking media, such as an online discussion forum, micro-blogging, We Chat and online review sites, etc., more and more companies want to be able to make use of these platforms play value and power of word of mouth marketing, thus attract a lot of companies to conduct word of mouth marketing.Marketing value of electronic word of mouth is increasingly being recognized and accepted by business. Currently, material incentives or some other incentives are taken by companies to attract consumers to share information about products or services on the social networking media platforms to influence other consumers’ purchasing decisions, but these practices often leads to ineffectiveness. However, scholars have studied the effect of word of mouth more concentrated in terms of effectiveness, for word of mouth ineffectiveness and mechanisms are still little theoretical support.This study defines the three dimensions of word of mouth information characteristics and tie strength from the perspective of word of mouth information elements and social network theory. Among them, the word of mouth information characteristics contain information presentation form, information type and information length. Then, the research framework and hypotheses are putted forward based on psychological reactance theory. And, combined with the results of previous studies, the paper explores moderating effect of product knowledge between information characteristics, tie strength and psychology reactance. In the study, the experiment with scenario simulation is used. It uses two(text plus picture vs.text) by two(factual vs.evaluative) by two(long vs.short) by two(strong vs.weak) in the between-subjects design. Data is collected by questionnaires, and is analyzed with SPSS.The results show that:(1)information type, information length and tie strength have significant influence on compulsive feeling and manipulative intent inference;(2)compulsive feeling and manipulative intent inference have significant influence on positive electronic word of mouth ineffectiveness;(3)mediating role of compulsive feeling and manipulative intent inference in information type, information length and tie strength to positive electronic word of mouth ineffectiveness are verified;(4)considering interaction terms of product knowledge level and information type, information length, tie strength respectively, the regression results show that the effect of product knowledge to compulsive feeling and manipulative intent inference are not significant,but there is an interaction with some variables.According the study, the results of this paper give some enlightenment for enterprise electronic word of mouth marketing operating, such as companies can give appropriate guidance on information presentation when the material incentives or other forms of incentives to guide consumers to share product-related information. For information dissemination, the number of words can not be too little, try to objective facts-based, and reduce consumer subjective emotion; moreover information can be targeted to people close to sender, thus lowering the recipient psychology reactance aim to achieve a good recommendation effect.