earticle

영어

As a new type of word-of-mouth information, online consumer review is an emerging channel of product information that is playing an increasingly important role in consumers’ purchase decisions (Chen and Xie 2008). The significant roles of consumer-created product information have been the center of researchers’ interests. There is ample research (e.g., Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Ba and Pavlou 2002; Forman et al. 2008) that highlights the effects of directions (i.e., positive or negative) of consumer review on sales, price, and product attitude. The motives of posting reviews are also major factors weighed by prior studies. However, there is a lack of understanding of consumer review as information itself. As a new type of information about product, how consumer review can be defined conceptually will fundamentally answer the question of why user-created information is better than seller-provided information. The objectives of this study unfold as follows. First, with regard to information relevance, it is aimed to theoretically define the new type of product information that is created by consumers. That will distinguish it from the seller-provided product information so that the reason of why online consumer review is more relevant to pre-purchase consumers. For this, the study takes on heighted importance for product context which consists of product physical context, product task context, product environment context, product spatio-temporal context, user physical context, and user mental context. These dimensions of product context will be elicited by laddering interview based on Means-End Chain(MEC) model and empirically tested in terms of unidimensionality and reliability. Second, based on the theoretical work, the newly defined concept will be empirically tested as a variable for investigating its impacts on consumer benefits and seller benefits. For this, scenario-based field experiment will be executed. Randomly assigned participants will be asked to visit one of two designated websites, and then read both consumer review and seller-provided information of the same pre-determined product. Next, they will answer questions about perceived adequacy of each type of product information and some dependent variables such as learning about the product fit with themselves and attitude toward website. Findings of this study will contribute the research stream in many ways. First of all, product information under user influence is conceptually defined and tested. This can be a fundamental of consumer review-related future research as increasing understanding of the distinguished attributes of consumer-created product information. Second, in the aspects of information relevance and adequacy, relative importance of this information will be revealed over seller-created information in terms of consumer benefits and seller benefits. Finally, product information accumulation and retrieval strategy of websites can be improved. Considering the type of their focal products, feedback or product review menus on their own websites can be redesigned to elicit a variety of the product context-related information from post-purchase consumers. This can also be implicative to e-marketplaces in making their feedback system more informative and relevant. In addition, beyond the utilization of consumer-created information, practitioners can also get an idea in ways of improving the seller-created information.