A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Perceived Usefulness Of E-word-of-mouth In The Film Market

With the continuous improvement of the Internet penetration,the decision reference of consumers has gradually changed from face-to-face word-of-mouth to electronic word-of-mouth.As a kind of narrative experience-oriented product,film is more limited in its intuitive perception and trial experience.with the purpose of reducing the risk of information asymmetry,consumers would read electronic word-ofmouth information about movies to guide their consumption decisions before watching them.In the virtual community of Douban Movies,there is a vast sea of electronic word-of-mouth information,among which only the part perceived as useful by the community members can influence their attitude and behavior.At the same time,the content of e-WOM risks revealing key information about the film in advance.On the one hand,spoiler would reduce uncertainty of consumption.On the other hand,revealing the plot may reduce the enjoyment of the story.This study tries to analyze the key factors affecting perceived usefulness from two dimensions: the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth publishers and the characteristics of text.In addition,the type of spoiler is introduced as a moderator variable to explore the marginal role in the impact mechanism of perceived usefulness.Furthermore,taking perceived usefulness as the mediating variable,an extended study is conducted on community members’ willingness to be involved,to discover the impact of electronic word-of-mouth on consumer behavior.Based on 31,632 long e-WOM collected from the virtual community of Douban Movies,the empirical analyses of the research hypotheses were carried out by using data analysis and processing software such as Python and Stata16.Due to the large number of zeros in the data and the high discretization,the zero-inflated negative binomial regression model is used to measure the influence on perceived usefulness,the following conclusions are drawn.Firstly,social network centrality of e-WOM publishers positively affects perceived usefulness,while professionalism shows a negative impact.Secondly,the sentiment tendentiousness,sentiment extremity,text length and age of electronic word-of-mouth texts are significantly positively correlated with perceived usefulness.Furthermore,in the process that e-WOM publisher and text characteristics affect perceived usefulness,spoiler shows a moderating effect,and the presence of spoiler weakens the influence on perceived usefulness.Finally,perceived usefulness plays a partial mediating role in the influence of publisher and text characteristics on community members’ willingness to participate in e-WOM.Theoretically,this study introduces spoiler,a variable that is extremely important for narrative products,into the analysis of perceived usefulness of electronic word-ofmouth,which brings a new perspective to subsequent scholars.In addition,extended research taking perceived usefulness as the mediating variable supplements previous literatures focusing on questionnaires.In practice,this study has practical guiding significance when narrative product enterprises conduct e-WOM promotion and when community members release e-WOM for the development of opinion leaders.Furthermore,as for the e-WOM platforms,this study proposes some management recommendations related to spoiler.