earticle

영어

Reviewing prior research literatures, I established several hypotheses about the effect of online review search behavior on consumers’ online purchase decisions. As the global marketing strategies are called for in the recent markets along with the development of the Internet and the spread of SNS, This study examines an effective control on online reviews as a tool for attracting the future consumers who are getting used to use smart phones as well as the Internet to get some ideas on the products to buy. Especially, as Korean consumers are so active in online communities such as blogs, cafes, social network services and so on due to the fast and leading development in IT technology, the online shopping malls are offering various kinds of reviews to attract those customers by reducing the uncertainty and increasing the trust of consumers. In addition, these days, consumers who are using social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and so on) can be exposed easily to reviews or sponsors’ ads written by or liked by friends. These unexpected reviews or ads related to friends online can attract potential consumers anyhow. Especially, Facebook offers several tools for marketers by giving some space on a page for sponsors’ ads or user-created ads with the button of ‘Like’, which will be shown to friends’ walls. Unlike direct search of reviews on shopping mall pages or search engines by consumers, these reviews and ads are not the ones that consumers are trying to find but the ones consumers encounter while enjoying online social networking life. From studying previous research, this kind of effects are found to be rarely researched even though there are many results that show positive sides of using social networking sites. Of course, there are so many factors which affect the purchase decisions, but recent and new interfaces of these social networking sites can be a good marketing tool for the company. Can this kind of reviews and ads on social networking sites work as an attractor? If so, what kind of characteristics can be considered as an important influencer? Will there be a possibility that a consumer exposed to that kind of reviews or ads can have a high and positive purchase intention enough to be a real purchaser? With the recent trend in using social networking sites of world users, there might be lots of topics to be uncovered. This study will also examine differences between Korean and international consumers from the social networking sites on the Internet surveying with the documents easily made by Google Docs. By countries, there might be different results as environmental factors differ, so there might be some interesting findings which will give insights on global marketing research fields. With this study, I expect that I can find some significant results on the effect of online review factors, which will bring us to a better understanding of the future online marketing strategies using social network services.