International Journal of Business Marketing and Management (IJBMM) Volume 6 Issue 7 July 2021, P.P. 53-61 ISSN: 2456-4559 www.ijbmm.com
Research on Online Reviews' Emotional Tendency and Perceived Usefulness: A Moderated Mediating Yina Su Business Management, School of Management / Shanghai University, China shirley.su1997@foxmail.com
Abstract: As one of the important forms of online WOM in a network environment, online reviews represents the subjective consumer feelings that consumers post after shopping. To avoid the loss caused by mistakes in decision-making, online reviews with different emotions become one of the important sources of information for consumers before making purchase decisions. Starting from the emotional tendency of online reviews, this study, on the basis of previous studies, further explores how it influences the perceived usefulness and purchase intention of consumers under the moderating effect of consumers' ambivalence attitude and consumption motivation. The results show that the positive and negative emotional tendency intensity of online reviews may positively affect consumers' perceived usefulness. Perceived usefulness may mediate the relationship between online reviews' emotional tendency and consumer purchase intention. Besides, consumers' motivation and ambivalence attitude may have a moderating effect on the relationship between online reviews' emotional tendency and perceived usefulness. Therefore, this is of great significance to pay more attention to consumer psychology and effectively manage and analyze online reviews.
Keywords: Online reviews' emotional tendency, Perceived usefulness, Purchase intention, Consumption motivation, Ambivalence attitude.
I.
INTRODUCTION
The development of network information technology has driven the development of the e-commerce industry. Online shopping silently changes the traditional shopping mode, and the consumer behavior mode undergoes a fundamental change. Different from physical shopping, in online shopping, it is difficult for consumers to directly understand the various features of the product through their senses. Thus, online reviews of other people become an important reference for consumers to understand the image of the product. According to a survey conducted by the China Internet Network Information Center(CNNIC), online reviews become the most concerning factor in users' online shopping decisions, accounting for 77.5%. In other words, online reviews are an important way for consumers to obtain product-related information, which will affect consumers' perceived value of products (Korfiatis, 2012) [1]. Podium's research in 2017 shows that 93% of online shopping consumers express that online reviews have an impact on their shopping choices, helping consumers to reduce the uncertainty of commodity information in the context of online shopping so as to make more reasonable shopping decisions (Lu et al., 2018)[2]. In terms of the characteristics of information, the information contained in online reviews has both cognitive characteristics (rational characteristics) and emotional characteristics (perceptual characteristics) (Yap et al., 2013)[ 3 ]. Cognitive characteristics are information about the attributes of goods or services, while emotional characteristics, mainly refer to the emotional intensity, emotional polarity, language style, vividness, and other emotional information expressed in online reviews. Based on this, the emotional characteristics of online reviews reflect the emotional tendency of the reviewers towards the purchased goods or services, which often enable consumers to perceive more accurate information about products or services. Research on the online reviews' emotional tendency and the psychological perception path behind its influence on consumers' decision-making will help merchants to better understand consumers' needs and guide online comment tendency to positively influence consumers' purchasing behavior. In addition, it can also help consumers to obtain
International Journal of Business Marketing and Management (IJBMM)
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